


A Controlled Burn

by jimmymcgools



Series: A Controlled Burn [1]
Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Mailroom-Era, POV Jimmy McGill, Pre-Canon, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:35:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 107,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23751691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jimmymcgools/pseuds/jimmymcgools
Summary: Albuquerque makes a disgustingly beautiful first impression: the sky as big and curved and blue as he’s always heard it can be, streaked with paintbrush clouds. Distant mountains rise from the impossibly-flat land like slumbering lizards, their skin mottled and cracked beneath the blistering desert sun.Jimmy never thought the straight and narrow could be so vast.
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Series: A Controlled Burn [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884472
Comments: 498
Kudos: 282





	1. The Ramada Hotel

When the plane touches down in Albuquerque, Jimmy can already feel the heat. It arrives first in his chest: an uncomfortable warmth that soon climbs the back of his neck and finally settles damp beneath his collar. The cabin of the 737, of course, remains as carefully climate controlled as ever, but, as the plane’s wheels screech along the tarmac and the squat hangars of the airport drift into view, Jimmy’s skin tightens and burns like it’s already frying beneath the New Mexico sun. 

One seat over, Chuck lies back with his eyes closed. He’s been feigning sleep for the last two hours, since somewhere over Iowa. A bold con, considering how everything in the man’s character over Jimmy’s thirty-two years has informed a Charles L. McGill completely incompatible with such blissful airline slumber. 

A Charles L. McGill who seems more golden god than mere mortal. A Charles L. McGill who, Jimmy decided during their last five years of non-contact, has to be more a childhood fantasy of competence and professionalism than a real brother, and who must, surely, have cracks somewhere in his shining marble exterior. But no—Chuck had arrived in the prison visitation room as celestially as ever, and through some artful wave of a hand had completely dismissed the charges against Jimmy, riding the currents of the Cicero judicial system as if they were designed specifically for his use. 

Jimmy examines Chuck’s profile now: the long nose lit by the sunlight that streams into the cabin. Still no cracks. Jimmy shoves out an elbow, and he can almost see the gears churning in Chuck’s head as his brother first stiffens then warily opens one eye. 

“We’re here,” Jimmy says, dumbly. 

“Yes, I can see that,” Chuck says, but he leans forward in his chair anyway, peering past Jimmy and out the airplane window. 

Jimmy follows his gaze. Albuquerque makes a disgustingly beautiful first impression: the sky as big and curved and blue as he’s always heard it can be, streaked with paintbrush clouds. Distant mountains rise from the impossibly-flat land like slumbering lizards, their skin mottled and cracked beneath the blistering desert sun. 

Jimmy never thought the straight and narrow could be so vast. 

* * *

Chuck speaks into a chunky, Gordon Gekko cellphone and stands off to one side as Jimmy waits for his suitcase. A wheel somewhere in the baggage carousel whistles and creaks, and the conveyor belt seems to move even slower than usual. Few suitcases emerge. The other travelers watch each new arrival with that patient drowsiness of airline travel.

Jimmy's skin crawls again, burning with discomfort and anticipation.

“Did Gurnstetter stop by?” Chuck asks whoever is on the other end of the phone call. He turns away from Jimmy slightly. “What did he say? And did you meet with him?” 

The little wheel—or gear, maybe—whistles louder. After a long time, Jimmy spots his brown suitcase. It’s the same case he packed on childhood trips to Wisconsin with his parents, trips that Chuck usually couldn’t join, at least not by the time Jimmy was old enough to really remember them. Back then, Jimmy would fill this suitcase with matchbox cars to show his Grandpa, or with as many comic books as possible. Now, it’s crammed with clothes, clothes that do not even really belong to him: sagging button-down shirts and ties and slacks that he bought before leaving Cicero, exchanging his old record collection and very same comic books for luck-of-the-rack picks at his local thrift store. 

“Good,” Chuck murmurs. “No—no. I’ll speak with him. He’ll come round.” 

Jimmy’s suitcase seems impossibly heavy as he hauls it off the carousel. He drops it onto a trolley, then wheels about to face Chuck. 

Chuck raises his eyebrows but continues his conversation without missing a beat: “Yes. That’s right. Salverson. Yes…” He turns, and Jimmy follows behind, trailing Chuck through the wide hallways. 

“Albuquerque,” says the town slogan in a towering font. “It’s a trip.” 

Yeah, thinks Jimmy. Only one letter off. 

* * *

“I have to go into the office,” Chuck says mildly, as they pull out of the parking lot of the Albuquerque International Sunport. It’s one of those early spring days, crisp and just warm enough for short sleeves, the kind of weather that lifts your mood no matter how much you fight it.

Jimmy shrugs out of his jacket and tosses it over into the backseat. He winds down his window and feels the snap of the wind on his face and in his hair. 

“I wouldn’t usually go in on a Sunday, but they need me,” Chuck continues. “I really shouldn’t have been away for so long.” He says the latter as though it’s Jimmy’s fault—which, Jimmy supposes, it is. 

“Client throwing a fit?” Jimmy asks, tapping his fingers on the clean leather of Chuck’s Mercedes. The car has that feeling of something well-used but kept in perfect condition, and part of him wants to take a surreptitious fingernail to the leather, to pick away at it where Chuck might not notice for a few days. 

Chuck sniffs at Jimmy’s suggestion of a ‘fit’. “Hmm. I suppose. But Stanley Gurnstetter has good reason to be worried, and with George laid up…well,” Chuck says. He flicks on his turn signal and changes lanes smoothly. “Personal relationships are everything in this business, you know, Jimmy. A company is no more than the people in it.” The last with a side glance to the passenger seat. 

“Absolutely,” Jimmy says, drawing out the ‘u’ sound. 

Chuck makes another humming noise. “I’ll drop you at the hotel; it’s on the way.” 

Tap tap tap. “Hotel?” 

Chuck stares straight ahead, eyes fixed on the road. “I had Howard recommend something. He says the Ramada is comfortable. Reasonable. Of course, I can lend you some money if you can’t—”

“I can pay,” Jimmy says—but, hotel? 

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” Chuck says, catching the unspoken question. “Rebecca has a big recital coming up, and she’s rehearsing late into the night. You wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

Right. 

“You’ll want your peace and quiet, especially after Monday. I hear things can get pretty hectic down there in the mailroom,” Chuck continues, almost absentmindedly.

The mailroom in Jimmy’s imagination: a world filled with pneumatic tubes, like an old-fashioned department store. Hundreds of frazzled employees run between them in an orchestrated dance as they transfer cylinders between the tubes to the rhythm of an artfully chosen soundtrack. A Gilliamesque bureaucratic hellscape, Jimmy thinks. The bustling engine room that drives the slick upper floors of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill—and these upper floors, too, still seem to Jimmy like something from a movie. A movie where George Hamlin sits behind an enormous desk at the end of a long room, balding in a tailored suit, some Gene Hackman character with the initials to match. And his son, who sounds from all of Chuck’s talk like a man lifted from superhero comic: Howard Hamlin, tall and blond and alliterative. 

The Mercedes whips along the highway, the flat road laid out over the desert like a thin coat of paint. Businesses and warehouses rise up out of the arid land like children’s toys, new and artificial-looking after Cicero, where the ancient buildings seemed composed of the bones of the city itself. Here, the architecture feels almost temporary, as if it’s been carelessly dropped on some enormous play-mat and forgotten.

The Ramada Hotel is no exception. It’s not far from the airport, and characterless—flat and empty and devoid of detail like a model building blown up to regular size. 

Chuck pulls up in front of the check in area. He lets out a long breath, then turns to Jimmy. He doesn’t unclasp his seatbelt. “Looks nice,” he says blandly. 

“Sure,” Jimmy says. He twists behinds him and grabs his jacket. “Thanks, Chuck.”

“You’re certain you don’t need money?” Chuck asks. 

“I can pay.” The truth, though painful. 

And it doesn’t seem to impress Chuck any. “All right,” Chuck says. “Well, I’ll let you get settled in. Buy a paper, if you can, and start looking for rentals. I’ll help with your deposit, of course,” he adds, as if preempting Jimmy’s objection, then continues blithely: “Remember, the mailroom starts early. Seven o’clock. Might pay to take a taxi for your first day.”

“Right,” Jimmy says. 

“And you know everything else already,” Chuck says. He reaches down and pops up the trunk of his car. 

So Jimmy takes the message and slides out of his seat. He hefts his suitcase from the trunk, drops it to the concrete beside the car, and then he walks back over to the passenger window just as Chuck finishes winding it up.

Jimmy bends down and peers through the glass to his brother’s golden profile. “Hey, Chuck? Thanks.”

Chuck winds the passenger window back down again, regarding Jimmy blandly. 

“I said thanks. For everything,” Jimmy says, injecting his voice with as much sincerity as he can. “I mean it.” And he does.

“All right, Jimmy. See you Monday.”

Jimmy nods. 

Chuck gives Jimmy a tight-lipped smile, begins to pull out, and then hits his brakes. “Ah!” he says, rifling through his jacket pocket. He pulls out a stack of cards, removes one, and leans over the passenger seat to offer it to Jimmy. “In case you forget the address.”

Jimmy takes it. _Charles L. McGill, Esq._ , the seriffed letters proclaim. Beneath them: the HHM logo, a phone number, and the office address. 

“Seven o’clock in the morning, Monday,” Chuck says, and then he peels away with the smooth rumble of a well-oiled machine.

“Monday,” Jimmy repeats tonelessly. He shoves the card in his pocket, then picks up his heavy suitcase and lugs it inside the Ramada Hotel. 

Outside, the too-blue sky seems to press closer, clouds forming and dissolving above the mountains and the edgeless desert. 

* * *

His room at the Ramada is musty and a bit damp, but Jimmy hangs his clothes up in the wardrobe anyway. The shirts drape on their hangers like empty shells. 

Suitcase emptied, Jimmy perches on the end of the double bed. Bounces up and down halfheartedly a couple of times. The mattress is firm and seems comfortable enough, and the bathroom is clean. Local superhero Howard Hamlin was right in suggesting this as a _reasonable_ option; Jimmy’s wad of hard-conned cash had been whittled down less than he expected when he paid for a week upfront. 

Jimmy unlatches his window and pushes it open, trying to air out the room with the breeze he caught on the drive over, but the world seems sluggish now—stagnant. The clock on the bedside table reads a grim 4:49pm. He’s arranged for tomorrow’s cab already, and, better safe than sorry, asked for a six o’clock pick up. 

With nothing for it, then, Jimmy leaves the musty room, bound for happy hour in the bleak and empty hotel bar he had glimpsed as he checked in earlier. It’s no less bleak and only slightly less empty when he arrives now, sliding onto a stool at the edge of the bar and ringing a bell until a bored-looking woman emerges to make him a rusty nail. 

Jimmy nurses it, sipping slowly until the drink’s maybe half finished and the ice has completely melted. He’s not hungry but he knows he should eat. Across the room, some guests are picking at a sad early dinner: wilted salads and chicken-fried steak. 

Two of them catch his eye—sisters, he thinks. Or close friends who happen to look alike, as close friends sometimes do. He takes another diluted sip, evaluating them through narrow eyes. The short-haired woman has the pinched-mouth appearance of someone who spends too much time around people they hate, or else finds a reason to hate everyone they’re required to spend time with. Potato potahto. She’s the weaker one, he reckons, the one who thinks she’s tough and world weary but so desperately wants everything to fit to her viewpoint she’ll believe anything that doesn’t challenge it.

It’s harder to get a read on the other woman. She looks, Jimmy thinks, tired, her dark hair pulled up in a loose bun, her salad almost untouched on her plate. Every few minutes, though, she’ll crack a smile at something the other says, bright and seemingly genuine. 

He could do it. Easily. A handout, he thinks, something that will leave these women feeling good about themselves, feeling like a pair of Mother Teresas. A sick child back in Chicago and money for an emergency plane ticket home. He could do it. 

But he doesn’t. His brother’s business card with its neatly-arranged letters burns a hole in his pocket. He orders a burger and fries and eats pretty much only the fries, dipping them in ketchup contemplatively as he tries to picture himself from the outside, picture himself as the victim, as the dupe, as the sucker. Thirties guy, hair already going at the temples, but long and unkempt as if he’s still clinging onto some high school dream. Patterned silk shirt straight out of the 70s. Looking for something to make him feel like a man again, probably. 

Easy prey. 

Everybody wants something, Jimmy thinks. And once you figure out what it is…

He sighs. Pushes his half-finished plate of food away from himself and sculls the last of his watery drink. At the table across the bar, the two sisters laugh over some shared joke, but Jimmy walks past them without looking. 

* * *

The hotel alarm blares sharp and piercing the next morning. Jimmy groans and hauls himself out of bed. He twists open the blinds: it’s that time just before sunrise when the sky fills with soft, pale light—magic hour. The roads are empty and washed with grey, the windows of distant buildings dark. 

He dresses by the glow of his bedside lamp, numbly pulling on the clothes he picked out last night. Brushes his teeth, shaves, and combs his hair mechanically above the sink. Flashes a smile to the ghostly figure looking back at him. The very model of a modern mailroom man. 

The hotel is sleep-ridden. Jimmy descends the stairs quietly, passing by the empty reception desk—“Ring for after hours service,” says a handwritten sign—and pushing through the glass doors at the front. Outside, the air still smells of night, and the world feels quiet and slumbering. 

His taxi hasn’t shown up yet. Jimmy claps the palms of his hands together and blows into them, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. In the impatient silence, his thoughts grow louder: this is it, this is it, this is the rest of his life, his last chance, the straight and narrow. A cog in the HHM machine: well-oiled and operational. He can’t think of the last time he approached something with such sincerity—if ever. 

But he was being honest when he told Marco this was an opportunity. If Jimmy closes his eyes, he can still smell his mildewy concrete cell in Cook County Jail, can still feel the pinch of the cuffs over his wrists and the rubber-gloved hands of the admissions officer. Can still hear the raspy laughter of Chet through the visitation glass. 

The taxi arrives. The driver grunts at him, and Jimmy slides into the backseat—another backseat in a very different world. Since that cop car, since his mother’s voice on the other side of a crackly phone line, since Chuck frowning at him over a metal table, Jimmy has felt cut off, untethered from the land. Floating above it all, unbound, as if he’s waiting for his life to begin again—or begin for the first time, thinks a quiet and oddly hopeful voice somewhere deep in his mind. He takes Chuck’s business card from his pocket and stares at it, the letters searing into his mind. _Partner. Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. _

The sun finally blinks over the mountains as they drive through downtown Albuquerque. Great orange clouds swell upwards, reaching for the soft blue sky.

And the offices of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill seem born of this very same blueness, clean and glossy, a perfect headquarters for his brother.

The taxi draws to a stop before the lobby.

It’s barely 6:20am, and the foyer looks dark, the reception desk unmanned. The cab driver taps on the meter reader on the dashboard, and Jimmy hands over some cash, then he steps out and stands on the curb, feeling completely clueless as the cab screeches away. 

The darkened interior of HHM leers at him. And dammit, Jimmy thinks, life’s so much easier when you’re breaking the rules. _Following_ the rules is what’s near-on impossible. Should he knock? Wait?

But, thankfully, as he stands there dumbly like the proverbial donkey trapped between two haystacks, a balding man in a business suit approaches the doors, drinking a coffee.

The man nods at Jimmy, then juggles the cup awkwardly as he fumbles for his keys in his pockets. “Early one, huh?” the man calls over. He wrestles a key into the lock and then pulls the door wide, evidently holding it open for Jimmy. 

“Sure is!” Jimmy says brightly, striding past him and over the threshold and making for the bank of elevators like he knows where he’s going. The man's footsteps ring out behind him, so Jimmy just as smoothly approaches the stairwell, pushing through the doorway and onto the landing without breaking a step. 

And then Jimmy stops. He lets out a long breath and closes his eyes. Feels Chuck’s business card in his pocket. Remembers the resignation in Chuck’s tone yesterday, the default pessimism: _in case you forget the address_. 

So he turns around, exits the stairwell, and approaches the balding man where he waits before the bank of elevators. 

“Hi,” Jimmy says, and he holds out his hand. “I’m new here. Jimmy.”

“Oh!” the man says, eyes widening. He shifts his coffee to his left hand and shakes Jimmy’s. “Welcome to HHM.” The elevator doors open with a little musical scale. “You going up?”

Jimmy peers inside. “I’m in the mailroom.”

“Ah!” the man says. “You’ll want to head down a floor, then.” He glances at his watch—a Rolex. His suit looks expensive, too, but there’s something about him, some tension in his eyes combined with the early hour and wrinkled shirtsleeves that strikes Jimmy as desperation. “I don’t think anyone else will be there yet,” the man continues, “but there’s a kitchenette with a Keurig where you can make a coffee before Ron shows up. He’s a character, huh? Must’ve been some interview.”

Jimmy opens his mouth, wondering if he should say he didn’t interview with Ron, didn’t interview with anyone actually, when the elevator doors start to close.

The man shoots out his arm to stop them. “Sorry Jimmy, gotta run!” he says, and he hops into the waiting elevator. “I’ll catch you around, and hey—” The doors close over his last words. 

The lobby is silent again. Jimmy runs a hand over his mouth.

He presses the down elevator call button and waits. Looks at his own watch: 6:23am. He feels a gnawing in the pit of his stomach.

“Hi, I’m James McGill,” he says, gesturing to his reflection in the elevator doors. “Oh, really? Well—yes, actually, he’s my brother.”

There’s nobody else around—the lobby still dim and empty, striped with shafts of amber light. 

“I’m James McGill—Jimmy. I’m _Jimmy_ McGill.” 

He watches himself like a stranger on a silver screen. He’s been so many other people, worn so many different guises beneath the smoke-thick air of Arno's (and always another one just within reach, always a second, third, fourth skin to slip into) that he’s not sure if he remembers…he’s not sure if he’s ever even known—

—but Jimmy catches the thought half-finished and shakes his head as if to clear it of water. 

“Hi, I’m Jimmy,” he murmurs, spreading out his hands, watching his warped reflection in the elevator doors. “Yeah, just Jimmy. Like, you know…Cher.” 

The elevator dings sympathetically, five ascending notes, and then the doors open, breaking his image in half. 

* * *

The mailroom is brighter than Jimmy expected. Small, high windows let in sunlight from outside, and computers and copy machines hum comfortingly. And there’s life here already: unlike upstairs, all the lights are switched on, and he can even smell coffee brewing. The promised Keurig, he thinks. 

There’s an assembly of mail carts near the landing, all empty, waiting for the day to begin. Copiers line the walls of a large central room. Filing boxes tower haphazardly in the gaps between them, and long tables occupy the central space. Down to the left, a glass door opens into a room filled with cubbyholes, and beside it another door hangs ajar, a warm light from within suggesting that it’s the breakroom. 

And of course the smell of coffee. 

So Jimmy follows his nose and heads for the warmly-lit room. There’s boxes of files in here too, somehow—but also lockers, a kitchenette, and a round dining table. 

A blonde woman, dressed in clean lines and soft blues, sits with her back to him at the table. She’s intently focused on a thick book, her head in her hand, and she doesn’t look up at his entrance. 

Nor does she look up when Jimmy makes a little coughing noise in his throat, or even after he offers an awkward hello. As he circumvents the table he discovers why: she’s asleep. Her mouth hangs open, her cheek squished upwards by her hand, and her other hand still grasps the handle of a half-full mug of coffee. 

Jimmy clears his throat again. Looks up at the open doorway, then back to the woman. Other than the current sleeping situation, she’s the picture of professionalism: makeup perfect, simple jewelry, and tidy, no-nonsense clothes. She’s reading some enormous volume on criminal law, its pages riddled with sticky notes. 

Probably preparing for an important case, he thinks. An all nighter before a big hearing this morning. So Jimmy reaches out and touches her shoulder gently, and she startles. 

“Hi—sorry!” he says quickly, stepping back and holding up his hands. 

The woman steadies herself, gripping her coffee mug as if worried she’ll spill it, then she squints up at him. “Yes?” she says. 

“You were asleep,” Jimmy says. 

“Jesus,” she says. She rubs her eyes with the pads of her fingers. “What time is it?” 

Jimmy presses the button on his watch. “Nearly six-thirty.”

“Oh, thank god,” she says. She scrambles for her papers, then shoves them all inside a briefcase and snaps it closed. Downs the rest of her coffee in one big gulp, snatches up the enormous law book, and hurries out of the kitchen without even glancing back. 

“Give ‘em hell!” Jimmy calls. He pours himself a cup of coffee, then sits at the table and waits. 

It’s not much later when the kitchen door opens again, and a red-faced man in a wrinkled suit steps through, opens his mouth, and sneezes. Jimmy stands up—but the man holds up his hand, sneezes again, and then wipes his nose with an old-fashioned handkerchief. He tucks the handkerchief into his shirt pocket, sniffs, and says, “So you’re the baby McGill, are you?”

Jimmy nods, shifting between his feet. 

“Hm. You don’t look much like Mr. McGill,” the man says critically. He runs his eye up and down Jimmy. Sniffs again. “But I guess I can see it. Welcome. I’m Ron Sheedy.” 

Ron holds out a hand and Jimmy, bravely, shakes it. 

“Been waiting long? Found the coffee, eh?” Ron asks, but he doesn’t for a reply to either question before turning on his heel (with a surprising swiftness for such an unhealthy-looking man) and continuing: “Now, Mr. McGill says you have no experience at all and that I should pat you down before I send you home every day, that right?” He leads Jimmy into the large central room. “This here’s the mailroom, obviously, I see you managed to figure out that much. You got your copy machines, workstations, paper reams and supplies out the back in the storeroom there, put an order in with Patty if anything runs low—” He stops mid-step and turns to face Jimmy. “So tell me. You gonna be more trouble than you’re worth? You here to fuck over your big bro or you here to do the job?”

Jimmy blinks. Ron seems to actually expect an answer to this last question, so he says, “I’m here to do the job.” 

Ron sniffs. “All right, then. So no experience working with copy machines?” 

Jimmy thinks briefly of a Xerox 6500 color copier spitting out hundreds and hundreds of phony five dollar bills. “No—not really, no.” 

Ron waves a hand. “No biggie. They do most of the work for you these days, eh? Beauties.” He gestures around the room, where the little red and green lights of the copy machines sparkle like some perverse version of Christmas. “I’ll take you through ‘em soon. I see you got here early, and I like that, that’s a good start, baby McGill.” He taps Jimmy on the chest. “Now, we’re assembling binders for Gurnstetter Limited v. Parsons at the moment, and it’s all hands on deck, all very stressful. Assembling is easy enough, just follow the list from upstairs, so as long as—” a loud sneeze “—as long as you can read, you’ll be fine. You _can_ read, right?” 

“Yeah, ‘course,” Jimmy says, though he’d be surprised if Ron heard his answer over the man’s next spluttering sneeze. 

Ron wipes his nose again with his handkerchief, then tucks it away and leans back against one of the big tables. “Listen. I like Mr. McGill. I was happy to agree to the request. Better some black sheep than another desperate law student, right? Long as you don’t think you’re better than.” Ron huffs, and stares vaguely at the landing area with the two elevators and flight of stairs. He wears the stillness poorly, and his greying mustache twitches a little as if preparing for his next vomit of words. 

The elevator doors open with a musical trill, and a bony, older man comes out pushing a fully-loaded cart of mail. As if this is the signal Ron had been expecting, he claps his palms together and continues his tour. It’s meandering and confusing, packed with accusatory statements and questions to which he only seems to expect a response about ten percent of the time. Jimmy tries to keep up, desperately repeating the most important information to himself, and hoping against hope someone else will take pity on him later. 

At some point about halfway through Ron’s explanation of proper stamping procedure, Jimmy notices the blonde woman from earlier emerge from the stairwell. She doesn’t have her briefcase or the heavy law book now, and she strides through the room without looking around. She enters the storeroom and comes out with a box, which she sets down beside one of the tables. Not a lawyer, yet, then? Jimmy wonders, watching her settle into her space.

She rubs her fingers over her eyes, and her shoulders drop in a sigh. 

Then she begins lining up blue binders along the table, one by one, like men before a firing squad. 


	2. The Mailroom

Jimmy’s first morning at HHM passes quickly. Henry, the bony older man he noticed earlier with the mail cart, provides a clearer-eyed tour of the mailroom after Ron leaves for somewhere upstairs. Henry gives Jimmy a rundown on a copy machine’s basic functions and then hands him an enormous stack of papers and tells him come back with twenty-seven black and white copies of each sheet, two-hole punched. 

It’s only a few printing mishaps (surreptitiously disposed of) later that Jimmy gets the hang of it. He spends hours sliding papers into the document feeder, checking and rechecking every button before he brings his finger down. It’s mind numbing. It’s boring. Slippin’ Jimmy the mailroom boy, huh? laughs a voice at the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Marco. Poisonous thoughts hover nearby, thoughts of how his price for freedom is doing this for years: the same button presses that are already starting to feel repetitive, every day the same, over and over again. 

Thoughts that’ll send him screaming up the stairs and out the door before he can stop himself. 

So Jimmy doesn’t think. He lets himself become his task, become one of the machines. And then, before he knows it, Henry is tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “Lunch break, Jimmy!” and leading him to the kitchenette. There’s a solitary vending machine from which Jimmy buys a packet of chips. He sits and chews on them slowly as Henry chats with another man whose name Jimmy hasn’t caught yet, and when he realises this he reaches out and introduces himself. 

“I’m Burt,” the man says. He’s young and dark haired and bright eyed. “So you’re Mr. McGill’s brother, huh? Ron told us you were starting here.”

Jimmy nods. The red-faced supervisor hasn’t returned since this morning. “What’s up with Ron, anyway? Doesn’t he work in the mailroom?”

Henry shrugs. “He’s Hamlin the Elder’s man. Been here longer than I have, and always claims to be allergic to something down here in purgatory.” 

There’s a rattle of wheels outside, and then the blonde woman from earlier enters the break room. 

“Finished up three and four,” she says curtly, as she retrieves some neatly-wrapped package from the fridge and plonks down in a seat. “We’re set until the afternoon delivery.”

“Wonderful,” Henry says. He turns to Jimmy. “Ron’ll probably get you doing the mail cart rounds later this week.”

“It’s like work release,” Burt says. “Get to leave this dungeon and explore the hallowed upper floors for a little bit.”

“I hope you’re good with names,” Henry adds. 

“I’m _great_ with names,” Jimmy says, but he’s looking at the blonde woman.

She unwraps a sandwich and begins eating it with determined precision, brow pinched, staring down at the table as if it still bears that enormous legal textbook from this morning. 

Burt follows Jimmy’s gaze. “Hey, Kim, you met our mini McGill yet?” 

The woman, Kim, looks up. She puts down her sandwich. 

“I’m Jimmy,” Jimmy offers, holding out a hand, and Kim shakes it crisply. “We met earlier.”

“Oh, right,” Kim says, sounding distracted. She frowns at the table again, mind seemingly back on other things already—focused and diligent and everything he knows he's not.

“So, you got any fun family stories, Jimmy?” Burt asks, filling the silence. 

Jimmy pops a BBQ chip into his mouth and crunches contemplatively. Fun stories? He picks some adventure that he and Marco took in eighth grade, swapping out Marco for Chuck and omitting a few of the more illegal parts. It’s not really as good of a story without them, but Henry and Burt seem to enjoy it, and the idea of Chuck hauling ass away from an enormous Rottweiler does eventually bring a smile to Jimmy’s face, too. 

* * *

Jimmy doesn’t see Chuck at all that day, or either of the Hamlins. He doesn’t, in fact, leave the downstairs level at all, just watches the sunlight slowly change through the small high windows and thinks that maybe he should take up smoking again just to have a reason to go outside. 

The afternoon mail delivery arrives at some point, and Kim and Burt sort through it in the cubbyhole room and distribute it between the carts again. The balding, Rolex-wearing man Jimmy met in the HHM lobby stops by that afternoon, too, a sheen of sweat visible on his lip even from across the mail room. He waves them all away jerkily and photocopies some papers himself, hundreds of sheets of color copies using one of the most expensive machines. 

Jimmy wonders if he should go say hello to Chuck. His natural instinct is that he should—that he should waltz upstairs and follow his nose (presumably to the grandest office in the tallest tower) and annoy Chuck where he lives. But it’s such a strong instinct that something tells him the ‘right’ thing to do would be to leave Chuck alone. And yeah, if he examines the instinct long enough, follows it to its inevitable conclusion, he knows it’s born out of a desire to embarrass Chuck more than anything else. 

Ron returns to the mailroom right as five o’clock rolls around. He casts a disparaging eye over them all, and then wanders down to Jimmy, who’s unjamming a copier that tried to swallow hundreds of sheets of paper simultaneously for (it seems to Jimmy, anyway) absolutely no apparent reason.

“You set the feeder size correctly?” Ron asks by way of greeting. 

Jimmy grunts. 

“He didn’t do anything; I jammed it,” Henry says, joining the two of them. He pats the copier like it’s a misbehaving dog. “Temperamental thing. Jimmy’s helping me out.” 

Jimmy plays along, snapping the tray shut and waggling his eyebrows and his hands. “I’ve got the nimblest fingers!” 

Ron just sneezes, then wanders off to the breakroom. 

Henry gives Jimmy a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Don’t tell your brother I said anything, but Ron can’t work one of these machines to save his life. Call him for help sometime; it’s worth a laugh on a bad day. And hey, closing time!” 

The glowing face of Jimmy’s watch reads 5:07pm. He watches as the others amble towards the lockers in the break room. Only Kim remains, standing before a distant copier as it spits out sheet after sheet. 

As the others wave goodbye, Jimmy leans forward over the table and thinks. He could get another taxi back to the hotel and spend another night in the insipid hotel bar. He could figure out public transport and catch a bus back instead. He could find a nicer bar somewhere in Albuquerque, or even a more divey bar. He could see if Chuck’s still here—no, out of the question. 

He could order Chinese from whatever menu’s in the bedside table in his hotel room and then immediately fall asleep. At the thought, the tiredness that’s been pressing on him all day becomes more insistent, and he sighs. Chinese it is. 

Kim begins packing up at the same time as his realization. She heads to the breakroom and shortly after emerges with her bag, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and tapping it rhythmically against her other palm as she makes for the elevators. 

“Hey, can I bum one?” Jimmy calls out. 

Kim stops and looks over at him.

“Can I bum one?” Jimmy repeats. “Could really use it.”

“Sure,” Kim says, and she flashes him a small smile. 

Jimmy pushes himself up from the table and glances around. “Do I need to turn anything off?” 

“No. The cleaners come through on Mondays,” Kim says. She runs a fingernail under the seal of the cigarette packet and opens it, then taps one out and holds it to him.

Jimmy takes the offered cigarette. “Thanks.” 

Kim inclines her head. She pulls out a cigarette for herself and heads for the two elevators. Jimmy follows, standing beside her in silence as she pushes the down button and then closes her eyes. She sways a little on her feet and Jimmy frowns. She looks, suddenly, tired. 

He can’t get a good read on her.

And then as if she can hear his thoughts, Kim surprises him again by asking, “So how was your first day?” 

Jimmy nods. “Good. Printed a lot of things, licked a lot of stamps. My tongue’s already dying!” 

“…Yes, that’s the worst,” Kim says, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.

The elevator chimes and they step in. Kim presses the button for a basement level and then looks up to him, but, when Jimmy doesn’t indicate any other floor, she lowers her hand. 

They ride the elevator down in silence, Jimmy absentmindedly tapping his cigarette against his palm. Kim has her eyes closed again, and her lips are moving a little, quietly, as if she’s running something over in her mind. 

When the doors open, they reveal a small, under-lit landing leading out to a darkly cavernous parking garage. The shadows stretch long, like something out of _All the President’s Men_ , and, as Jimmy and Kim step onto the concrete, their footsteps echo, ringing in the air even after they both stop moving. 

Kim clicks her lighter and ignites her cigarette. She takes a long pull. Holds in the smoke for a while before releasing it, like a sigh. 

“Can I?” Jimmy asks, gesturing to the lighter. 

Kim nods, passing it to him. She leans against the wall and Jimmy stands, a little awkwardly, nearby, lighting his own smoke and then dragging on it before handing the lighter back. Kim accepts it with a quiet thank you. 

His voice echoes hollowly in the garage. “I thought you were a lawyer. This morning."

Kim nods. “That explains the ‘give them hell’.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. 

Kim takes another smoke. “I’m studying to be one. Second year at UNM. Night classes mostly.”

And suddenly that worn-down edge of tiredness makes sense. A worse version of him would look at this woman working all day in a mailroom and somehow finding time to study for a law degree and think that she’s a sucker—that there must be some easier way to do it, some short cut, some cheat. But Jimmy can remember when Chuck was off at Georgetown, younger than all his peers but you wouldn’t know it to look at him, and already so busy he could barely make it home for family holidays. 

He can’t imagine Chuck delivering mail or two-hole punching documents for hours on end. 

He can’t imagine having that kind of drive.

“So why the law?” Jimmy asks.

Kim looks at him curiously, face striped with shadow. 

“Sorry,” Jimmy says, holding up his hands, cigarette pinched between two fingers. A speck of ash falls onto his shirt. “Personal question, I know. Chuck has a standard answer he trots out at family gatherings.”

“Sounds helpful,” Kim says. 

“Something about the law being the most important invention in the history of civilization, I think,” Jimmy says. “Mankind’s greatest achievement.” He gives a short chuckle. “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t?” Kim asks. “I thought you were here—” She catches herself and stops. “Sorry. Almost asked a personal question myself.” 

Jimmy shrugs and deflects, happy to avoid explaining why he’s working in his brother’s mailroom. “I mean, the law is great and all, no offense,” he says. “But greatest invention? Guess Chuck hasn’t discovered flushing toilets yet.”

Kim snorts quietly. She drops her cigarette and stamps it with her heel. “It’s the new environmental policies they’re rolling out. No more flushing.”

Jimmy grins delightedly and finishes his own cigarette. “That explains it, then,” he says, breathing out smoke. 

“I’m off. I have class in an hour. See you tomorrow,” Kim says, and she pushes herself up off the wall and begins walking deeper into the garage. 

“Thanks for the smoke,” Jimmy says, inclining his head. 

Kim nods in acknowledgement and then disappears into the darkness. 

But Jimmy can hear her long after she vanishes, heels clicking metrically on the concrete floor. 

* * *

That night, Jimmy falls asleep by 9.30pm, lying fully clothed atop his covers and drifting away to the lulling sounds of _Murphy Brown._ When his alarm blares the next morning, the TV is still going, some religious local thing that fills the darkened room with flashes of color. 

He groans and rolls over onto his stomach but doesn’t shut off the alarm, knowing that if he does he’ll sleep for another few hours at least. Eventually, he slides out of bed. Showers and gets dressed almost on auto-pilot, brushing his teeth in front of that zombie in the mirror, who today has hooded bags beneath its eyes. 

The bus stop is a little way down the road from the hotel, and Jimmy walks to it in the almost dawn with his hands in his pockets and the cold air tickling his bare forearms. He steps from pool to pool of yellow light beneath the cones of the streetlamps, mothlike.

At the stop, the bus arrives with a grumbling moan, moving as sleepily as its passengers, who sit here and there and stare with lidded eyes out the windows. Jimmy finds an empty seat and watches the squat, square buildings of Albuquerque drift by beneath the purple light of magic hour—an auto parts shop, a drug store, a McDonald's. And then, as the bus hangs a right, they pass a sign for the University of New Mexico, its campus buildings as geometric as everything else. 

Jimmy arrives at HHM early again, even with the added time of bus travel. He walks through the darkened lobby, feeling the difference from yesterday, enjoying the knowledge that today he _does_ belong, and he _does_ have a purposeful destination. He nods at a woman waiting by the bank of elevators and descends the stairs, emerging into a mailroom that smells, once more, of fresh coffee. He smiles and, though the door to the break room is closed, he heads for it determinedly. 

And, sure enough, Kim is sitting at the table again, facing the door this time, but similarly surrounded by books and notepaper. She glances up at his entrance and nods in greeting. 

“Morning, uh—” Jimmy snaps his fingers “—Katherine Hepburn.” 

“Katherine Hepburn?” Kim asks. 

“Sure, _Adam’s Rib_ ,” Jimmy says, folding his arms. “She’s a lawyer in that, right?”

“I’m not a lawyer yet, remember?” Kim says. “I'm just tired and grumpy. Better make it _On Golden Pond.”_

Jimmy chuckles. He pours himself a cup of coffee and sits opposite her at the table. Kim drops her head back into her hand and stares intensely at the book before her, eyes tracing back and forth. She doesn’t seem distracted by his silent presence, so Jimmy stays there. He picks up a spare book from the pile beside her (the thinnest one) and skims the intro, something dull and pompous about how contract law will change the world. After a few paragraphs he almost checks the front cover to make sure Chuck hasn’t written it. He closes it again with a snap, and Kim chuckles. 

“What?” Jimmy asks. 

“Boring, huh?” Kim says, looking over at him. She puts down her pen and flexes her hand. “It’s great having access to the HHM library, but I don’t think they’ve updated the books since Howard passed the bar.” 

“Library?” 

“Upstairs,” Kim says. “My roommate is a disaster and I don’t like taking the books home. So I come in early and make as many notes as I can. I don't want to buy what I don’t need.”

“Couldn’t you—” Jimmy begins, and he glances towards the door and then back at Kim. “There’s a whole stampeding _herd_ of photocopy machines out there, couldn’t you just copy the pages? Ron told me my employee code to use if I need to photocopy anything personal.” 

Kim chuckles. “They still charge you for that.”

“Oh.”

“Besides,” she says, and taps the side of her head with her pen, “it’s better to make notes as I read. Have to do it eventually, no way around it.” 

Jimmy hums. Kim flexes her hand one last time, and then she begins scribbling again, eyes drawn downwards in intense concentration. Jimmy sips his coffee contemplatively, and the two of them sit in a silence marked only by the whispering of the pen over paper, until Ron arrives and the workday begins. 

* * *

It’s the third visit of the balding, Rolex-wearing man that gets Jimmy really curious. The guy’s been down to the mailroom twice already that day, and, just like yesterday, he spends his time photocopying hundreds of pages, standing alone before the expensive colour copier. 

“Who _is_ that?” Jimmy asks, looking up again from the order sheet he’s supposed to be checking off against a set of printouts. 

Burt follows his gaze. “Who, Carl Vernon? He’s a fifth year associate.” 

“What’s he doing?”

Burt shrugs. “Likes to make up his own binders, real fancy. Runs through the high GSM paper. Like that’s gonna win him the case.”

Across the table, Kim clicks her tongue. “What a waste of time.”

“And money,” Henry adds. 

“Doesn’t trust us, maybe,” Burt says. “I guess he’s got something big coming up, he’s not usually down here so often.” 

Vernon leaves with his stack of papers, and Jimmy forgets about him again, falling back into the calm monotony of his work. It’s easy to become nothing in the mailroom, surrounded by the humming photocopy machines and repetitive snapping of staplers or hole-punches. Hypnotic, almost. Therapeutic, a better person might think. 

Or maybe it’s easy to become nothing as Jimmy McGill because he’s already—

—but, like last time, Jimmy cuts this thought off before he can finish it. He slams down on a stapler with the palm of his hand, then onto the next sheet, moving fluidly. 

Well-oiled. 

* * *

“Shit, shit, shit!” 

Jimmy looks up. A frazzled young woman stands before the expensive color copier, pressing buttons hurriedly as the machine spits after sheet after sheet of blue-streaked paper. 

“ _Shit!_ ” she hisses again, dropping papers to the floor. She looks over helplessly, and, since Burt and Henry are upstairs for the afternoon mail run and Kim is busy across the room, Jimmy realizes it’s on him to fix things for her. 

By the time he reaches her, she's given up, and is just watching the copy machine in despair. 

“It won’t stop,” she whispers helplessly as he steps up beside her. 

Jimmy grunts. He hasn’t used this machine much, so, after a moment of deliberation, he reaches around the back and switches it off at the wall. The last sheet of ink-streaked paper spits out of the tray, then it stops. 

“Whew, thanks,” the woman says, running a hand over her face. “I don’t know what I did.”

“Nothing wrong, I’m sure,” Jimmy says placatingly. Kim looks over at them and he shoots her a thumbs up. 

“You can fix this quickly, right?” the woman says. 

“Um.” 

“It’s just that Mr. Vernon sent me down with a print order, and he has to leave in five minutes, and he wanted me to redo the assessment Mr. McGill wrote up for him so that it’s on the right paper—” She pauses, collecting herself. “I'm sorry. I'm Clara, I'm Mr. Vernon's assistant. How long until it’s fixed?” 

“Can’t you just use a different machine?” Jimmy asks. 

“No, no, no, he says it needs to be this one!” Clara says. “I messed up once before and used the wrong one and I never heard the end of it.” 

Jimmy swallows. He reaches out and turns the machine on again. The status light flickers orange for a few pulses, then turns red. He hears footsteps approaching and looks up to see Kim.

Kim frowns at the machine. She holds down the power button to turn it off, then turns it on again. The light pulses orange, then glows red. Kim sighs. “I can try some things, but this might need a technician,” she says. “If you’re in a rush, I’d use one of the other machines.” 

“No, no—” Clara says. “I can’t just—he's going to think I broke it—maybe if one of you could come up and explain?”

Kim blinks. 

“To Mr. Vernon, I mean. It _needs_ to be this machine. He can tell. If he thinks I broke it…” Clara says, voice thin and desperate. She looks between them helplessly, and Jimmy can see the exact moment Kim resigns herself to going up and getting yelled at by a balding, Rolex-loving fifth year associate. 

He sees it, and he steps forward. “No. I know what to do.”

“You know how to fix it?” Clara asks. 

“Well, no,” Jimmy says. He looks between them, between Clara’s wide eyes and Kim’s intrigued ones. He smiles and he can feel his shoulders relaxing. “Let’s grab up all those papers—the streaked ones, you got it. Stack them like you would normally.” 

Clara follows his directions with shaking hands as he passes her the sheets that had fallen to the ground. She squares off the edges of the stack. 

“That look right? Too thin, maybe?” Jimmy asks. 

“Yeah, too thin.”

“Okay, shove some blank sheets in the middle,” Jimmy says. He hands them to her, and Clara slips them into the center of the stack. “Looks great. Now, what floor is Vernon on?”

“Four.”

“Four, okay. I’ve never been to four, is there a break room?”

“Sure, by the elevator.”

“Perfect!” Jimmy says, grinning. He inhales slowly, and it feels like bursting up through the water’s surface and breathing again. It feels like the first hit of oxygen after drowning. “Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it…” 

* * *

Jimmy can barely keep the smile off his face as he waits by the entrance to the fourth floor breakroom with an enormous cup of coffee in his hand. He takes a small sip from it—it’s lukewarm.

It’s perfect. 

The minutes drift past, that special kind of time that's both slow and fast at once. Jimmy leans casually against the wall, and he feels like he’s been waiting here for hours—yet, as the elevator doors open with their musical five-note motif, and he hears Clara give the predetermined cough, part of him would swear that no time had passed at all. 

Jimmy steps out of the breakroom door and hangs a sharp right, whistling to himself, head down and focused on an imaginary task and then—

_SLAM._

As Jimmy and Clara fall together, the world slows again, and he glances at her, at the bundle of paper clutched to her chest, and he has enough time to snake his hand out and make sure the entire stack is completely drenched in coffee. 

“Hey!” Clara cries, hitting the ground hard. 

Jimmy winces for her, and pulls himself free. “I’m so sorry!” he says, bumbling and hopeless, grabbing the soggy papers from the floor and rifling through them as if checking to see if they’re salvageable. “This isn’t too bad, once it dries it’ll—” 

“It’s ruined!” Clara spits, pulling herself to her feet. 

Jimmy smothers a grin. She’d said she wanted to be an actress when she was a kid, and he definitely believes it now. He lets her have her moment yelling at him in front of the fourth floor citizens, her eyes flashing, until finally she extends an apologetic hand like the bigger woman. Jimmy, his striped white shirt stained and dripping, shakes it warmly. 

When Carl Vernon finally comes charging out of his office, Jimmy and Clara have almost finished collecting up all the completely ruined papers. The desperation that Jimmy sensed in the man at their first meeting is vividly clear now, and he glares at them with eyes bloodshot and dark like a man strung out on coffee and no sleep. 

“I’m so sorry,” Jimmy says, holding up his palms. “My fault, I wasn’t looking where I was going.” 

In a cubicle nearby, a man chuckles. “He ain’t kidding. Went charging down the hallway like a bull.” 

“Is that the copy of Charles’s final Farnsworth assessment?” Vernon asks. 

Clara nods, gripping the wet pages. 

Vernon curses. “Don’t you know how much it costs me to redo it like that? Papadoumian is definitely going to notice. God!” He turns around and kicks one of the cubicle dividers. His shoulders shift as he breathes heavily, and his hands tremble. 

“I’m really sorry,” Jimmy says lightly, eyes flicking to Clara and back. 

“It’s too late now,” Vernon says, looking at his Rolex. “We’ll have to make do with the black and white non-lettered copy.” He huffs, and surveys the two of them. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he adds, unconvincingly, and then turns and storms back to his office. Clara nods once to Jimmy, a small, almost unnoticeable, thing, then she trails after her boss. 

Jimmy returns to the mailroom damp and stinking of coffee. The dark liquid has soaked into his undershirt and spread over the front of his slacks. He steps out of the elevator and looks at the broken copy machine, and then around at the rows and rows of boxes and white electric lights shining bright in the central space. 

Across the room, he sees Kim watching him, smiling.


	3. Lomas Blvd

Jimmy longs for his old Cutlass as he waits at the bus stop nearest Chuck’s house. It’s dark out, the air musty and cold enough to cut through his windbreaker. He folds his arms tightly and leans against a lamppost. The traffic here is thin, the suburb already tucked away for the night, and Jimmy breathes out slowly. He can still taste the lemon fish Rebecca made for dinner.

He had only seen Rebecca once before tonight, in a photo attached to the couple’s wedding invitation all those years ago. He’d felt proud, then, of the radiant happiness exuding from the woman his brother had found to marry, and he’s even prouder now knowing that it wasn’t just some artful snapshot or a trick of the light. Jimmy _likes_ her—and, as the relief finally sinks in, he grins. He likes her, and she seems to like him, and at dinner Chuck looked happy. 

The dinner invitation had come earlier that day, just before lunch. Jimmy had been finishing up his first actual mail delivery, tapping his fingers on his cart and running over the new names he’d learned, when he’d felt a tap on his shoulder. 

Chuck stood behind him in the hallway, smile on his face. 

“Hiya, Chuck,” Jimmy said. He made a show of looking through his empty mail cart. “No letters for you, sorry!” 

Chuck gave an abortive, half laugh. “That’s all right. You’re settling in, then?”

“Sure am." He tapped his fingers on the mail cart again, then caught himself doing it and stopped. 

“Wonderful. Ron’s spoken well of you to George. I’ve only heard one horror story so far,” Chuck said, tossing off the last part like an afterthought. 

“Oh?”

“Something about coffee and ruined documents?” Again casual, like Chuck was commenting on the weather. 

Jimmy felt heat rise up his back, but he shrugged casually. “Tight corridors you got in this place.”

“Ah. Right. Well, listen, Rebecca’s asked you round for dinner. Is tonight okay?” 

Jimmy had agreed. He’d returned to the mindless monotony of mailroom work, watching a machine spit out copy after copy of the same document, each perfectly stapled and ready to go. At the end of the day, Jimmy had gathered up his things and managed to track down a liquor store selling Old Style before making his way across town. Chuck’s house was everything he’d thought it would be: perched proudly on a street corner, edged by lawns and parks and perfect citizens. 

And now he stands in the same suburb in the darkness, waiting for a bus that’s coming up on twenty minutes late. With his Cutlass, he could be back at the hotel already. Instead he lingers in the silent pools of the streetlamps and tastes lemon fish.

Is there a life for Jimmy McGill here? A life of home-cooked meals and family dinners? Life in the ‘burbs with a wife and 1.5 kids and pastel-colored polo shirts and honey-I’m-home? Down the street, a man sits on his porch, golden retriever at his feet. He’s tall and old, but Jimmy can see himself in him, if he really tries. Can even see the appeal of that kind of slow-moving, suburban peace.

But he can also see himself walking down to that white picket fence, to that caring man with his well-groomed yellow dog, and scamming him for fifty bucks. He can already feel the perfect sob story bubbling up from the eternal wellspring within him, but he looks away before it breaks the surface. 

Somewhere nearby, Jimmy knows, just a few blocks over, is the Rio Grande, running slow. If he thinks about it he can almost hear the water. An ordinary part of life for Albuquerque residents, but for him a name still synonymous with John Ford, with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Or even just Duran Duran, singing in bright colors on a sailboat. 

A name bigger than the place he’s ended up. 

* * *

Jimmy signs the lease on his Beachcomber apartment that Sunday. It’s small, just two rooms and a bathroom—or one room and a bathroom if you’re feeling less generous about the arched partition. He pays the advance rent and security deposit with the cash that Chuck had handed him in an envelope at the end of Friday night’s dinner. It’s just enough, and Jimmy relaxes. He can’t move in for another few weeks, but he likes the feeling of certainty, and, when he returns to the Ramada that afternoon, the dusty rooms and empty bar are easier to swallow.

There’s a covered, outdoor area attached to the hotel restaurant, and Jimmy sits in it that night, eating his way through a burger and watching the planes drift down to land at the airport. Last Sunday he was on board one of them. It feels much longer than a week ago—although he has the sneaking feeling, if he were to return to Cicero tomorrow, to roll back up to Arno’s and fall asleep beside Marco at the bar, on waking this whole time in Albuquerque would just feel like a vanishing dream. 

Jimmy runs a hand through his hair, shocked again at the shortness. He went to a barber on Saturday and got it cut into something a little more formal, and he’s not used to it yet. His head feels cold in the evening air, exposed and naked, though he hadn’t even let the barber trim it as close as the man had wanted. 

The short hair is surprising, still, when he sees it in the mirror the next morning. At least his bleary ghost looks a bit more lively today. Maybe it’s the neat hair or maybe it’s the absence of dark bags under its eyes. 

And it’s a beautiful day outside, with a bright blue sky and a crisp spring sun that’s already warming up earlier than last week. Jimmy feels the heat on his bare forearms like the touch of a hand. 

He sits on the left side of the bus, the side that catches the streaming sun. The flat University of New Mexico campus buildings coast past his window, and Jimmy watches the few figures that move between them, the students getting an early start on their day or the professors preparing for upcoming classes. 

He closes his eyes and lets the sun warm his face. 

* * *

“Morning, Spencer Tracy!” Jimmy says brightly, when he sees Kim hard at work over another enormous law book in the break room. He had found her there every morning last week without fail, more reliable even than the copy machines, and this week seems set to repeat the pattern. 

Kim looks up. “Spencer Tracy? Are we back to _Adam’s Rib?_ ”

Jimmy holds up his finger. “Nope! _Inherit the Wind._ ”

“Got it,” Kim says, looking back down at her book. “At least he won in that one.”

“I thought they found Darrin guilty.” Jimmy busies himself at the coffee machine, filling a huge HHM-branded mug and humming.

“Yes, they did,” Kim says. “They fined him one hundred dollars and then overturned it. Scopes was found guilty, but Clarence Darrow _won_ that case.” She looks up at him and chuckles. “Spencer Tracy, I mean.” 

“‘Course he won,” Jimmy says, plopping down at the table. He raises his mug of coffee to Kim. “So congratulations.” 

Kim picks up her own cup, inclines it him, then says, “Cheers, Paul Newman.”

Jimmy drinks, then chuckles. “If you’re not a lawyer, I’m _definitely_ not one.” 

“Not Paul Newman in _The Verdict_ ,” Kim says mildly. She looks back down at her law book as if she’s lost interest, but Jimmy can tell she’s just waiting out the moment because her eyes aren’t skimming back and forth as fast as normal. Eventually, she glances up at him again and grins. “ _The Hustler_.” 

Jimmy laughs brightly, feeling it warm in his belly. Kim chuckles too, but then she sighs, and drops her head into her hands. Jimmy surveys her and the table—are there more books than normal, more scattered notes? He reaches out and picks up a loose page of yellow paper. It’s covered edge-to-edge in illegible scribbles, wildly different from her usual careful writing. 

“You can read this?” he asks carefully.

Kim groans. “That’s from yesterday. I was pretty strung out on coffee. We have a review tonight and I only know about fifty percent of this—” she gestures around the table “—this!” 

“I bet you know more than you think,” Jimmy says. He picks up another sheet of paper, scans it briefly then looks back at Kim. 

She stares at him, eyes intense. “I don’t.”

Jimmy inclines his head. “I’ll stop distracting you.”

“No, no, I needed the break,” Kim says. She pinches the bridge of her nose. Silently mouths something like she’s trying to memorize it, then drops her hand. “It’s fine. We’re not expected to know it all yet, but, you know…”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, watching her closely. Her hands are shaking a little. “Careful on the caffeine, though, or nobody will be able to read your answers later.” He looks down at the paper he’s still holding. “What does this even say? Whether… past consideration… valid consideration… enforcement of contract… see Moe and Larry?”

“Moore v. Elmer,” Kim grunts. 

“Moore v. Elmer, wow,” Jimmy says, smiling. “Whether past consideration is valid consideration for enforcement of contract… see Moore v Elmer. Holmes ruled… that the sittings did… count? Count—”

“Did _not_ count.”

“That’s a ‘not’? I thought it was a coffee stain,” Jimmy says. Kim laughs, and he throws down the yellow paper. “See! You know this shit.” 

Kim huffs out a breath. “I don’t,” she says, but more warmly than last time. “But thank you.”

Jimmy cheerses her with his coffee mug again, then settles back in his chair. Kim starts writing out notes, though slower than earlier. The two sit quietly until the rest of mailroom arrives at seven o’clock, but Jimmy breaks the silence every so often to ask a question from a page of notes, to which Kim inevitably gives the correct answer. 

* * *

Later that day, an intern comes down into the mailroom. Nothing out of the ordinary, but this one (Sally, short and diligent) has a message for Jimmy: Howard Hamlin would like to see him, when he gets a moment. And then Sally stands there with her hands clasped before her as if expecting Jimmy to follow her right away, so he does, sharing a curious look with Burt on his way out the door. 

Howard’s is the corner office on the second floor. The man himself sits behind a desk, writing something on HHM-branded letterhead. It’s the first time Jimmy has really seen Howard other than from afar, and he’s annoyed at the man’s all-American perfectness even more when it’s only a few feet in front of him. 

Howard looks up at his entrance. “Jimmy!” he says cheerfully, standing up from his desk and holding out his hand. “We finally meet. I’m sorry not to have done it sooner; I’ve been snowed under with cases.” 

Jimmy shakes the proffered hand. 

“I’ll admit you were a surprise to learn about,” Howard says. “But Chuck’s always played things close to the chest—here, sit.” He beckons to Jimmy, and the two perch opposite each other on some uncomfortably-stylish white chairs. 

Out the windows, the sky shifts to a perfect, Hamlindigo blue. 

Howard crosses his right leg neatly over his left and clasps his hands together. “We have something in common,” he begins.

“We do?” Jimmy asks.

Howard inclines his head. “We do. Your brother and my father. Partners at law. Practically mythical.” He smiles. “Have you met my father yet?”

Jimmy hasn’t even _seen_ George Hamlin. “No.” 

“You will. He’s a lot like Chuck. You couldn’t find two people more passionate about the law. A word to the wise—” Howard holds up a finger “—don’t bring up constitutional law around my father unless you want to listen to an hour-long lecture on incorporation and Duncan v. Louisiana.” 

“I wouldn’t know how if I wanted to,” Jimmy says, and he chuckles weakly.

Howard gives a little laugh, too. “Well, make it a few more weeks here and the law will rub off on you. I wanted to be a race-car driver until my father started bringing me into the office every weekend…”

Jimmy isn’t sure what to say, so he just nods. 

“Anyway!” Howard says, shaking his head. “I thought the two relatives of the great Hamlin and McGill team should meet. How are you settling in?”

“Good,” Jimmy says. “Really good. You’ve got some great folks down there.” 

“And happy to have another!” Howard says. He taps his clasped hands on his thigh. “Any problems, any questions?”

“No,” Jimmy says. “No, I don’t think so.” 

“Well,” Howard says. “Good. I’m here to help.” He taps his hands again. “Don’t think of it as a dead-end job. We reward effort and merit at HHM.”

Jimmy frowns. He wonders how much Chuck told this man. He wonders if Howard knows about the sunroof. “So why a race-car driver?” he asks quickly. 

“Oh, you know, what kid didn’t want to drive for Ford in the ‘60s?” Howard says easily. He leans forward in his seat. “Listen, Jimmy, I know it can be hard to settle into a new job.”

A phone rings somewhere outside. “Sure,” Jimmy says. 

“And a change of city, too! That must be challenging.” Howard fixes Jimmy with an intense stare, then, when Jimmy doesn’t respond, drops his gaze. “Well. I don’t want to keep you. I’m sure they’re missing you. The mailroom waits for no man!” Howard stands, and Jimmy mirrors him. “You’ll reach out if you think of any questions?”

Jimmy nods. “Sure.”

“Great, Jimmy. As I said, we have more in common than you think. And give my best to everyone downstairs.” He steers Jimmy to the door efficiently. “Thanks for stopping by, Jimmy!”

Jimmy leaves the second-floor office, baffled. Howard's assistant gives him a polite little nod and he smiles awkwardly at her, then returns downstairs. 

* * *

Jimmy watches Kim as five o’clock rolls around. He’s applying stamps to letters (with the sponge this time) and listening to Henry and Burt argue about pizza toppings. Kim’s across the mailroom photocopying something, her lips moving silently, obviously still running over her notes in her mind. He feels like he can see certain words—contracts, versus, consideration—returning again and again. When the copy machine runs out of paper, it takes her much longer than normal to notice. 

So, when Ron comes down and tells them all to go home, Jimmy lingers, waiting for Kim to approach the breakroom first. She tidies up her workspace and then heads over there, and he follows. He stands in the doorway as she fishes her purse from her locker. “You’re driving to UNM now, right?” he says. 

Kim looks up. “Yes. I have class in ninety minutes. I don’t really have time for a smoke, today, but—”

“No, no,” Jimmy says, and he holds up his palms. “Not that. I have a great idea.” 

Kim shifts her purse to her shoulder and stands, but she raises her eyebrows at him. 

“Give me a lift to my hotel,” Jimmy says.

With a laugh, Kim pushes past him and out the door. “That’s your great idea? No wonder you’re the mailroom McGill, not the law partner McGill.”

Jimmy just rolls his eyes and follows her. “No, listen. It’s the same direction. I go past UNM every day, and I know the traffic is hell right now, you could easily be sitting in it for half an hour. That’s half—” Jimmy skips to catch up with Kim, who’s stepped through into the downstairs lobby without waiting for him “—half an hour when you can’t study or look over your notes. So let me help!” He holds out his arms triumphantly. 

Kim pushes the call button for the elevator then looks over at him. 

Jimmy leaves his arms out, palms forward, and smiles. “I’ll quiz you, I’ll read out your terrible scrawl, whatever. And—hey, bonus!—I won’t have to sit beside an eighty-year-old woman crunching hard candies on the bus!” He fixes his smile and stops talking. 

“All right, then,” Kim says, and she smiles back at him. 

The elevator arrives with its musical flourish, and they step inside. “You can just drop me near UNM,” Jimmy says as he pushes the button for the parking garage. “The Ramada’s real close so I can walk. And that means maximum study time before your test.” 

“It’s not a test, it’s a review,” Kim says. “And I said yes, you can drop the sales pitch.” 

Jimmy chuckles. “Guess I just miss selling people.” 

“You worked in sales?” Kim asks. The elevator arrives at the basement level and the doors open. 

“No, not really,” Jimmy says, as they step out and cross the landing. “I mean, you know…I mean _selling_ people.” He stops, holding the door to the garage open for Kim. “Like with Clara and Rolex Vernon last week.”

Kim meets his gaze for a moment before she steps past him. 

Jimmy follows, drawing up beside her. They walk together in silence, footsteps sharp punctuation on the concrete, until they reach Kim’s car. She unlocks it and opens the passenger door, shifting a mess of notes and books over into the backseat. Her briefcase is in the footwell and she retrieves it and opens it, pulling out a sheaf of papers and handing them over to him. 

“That’s the most important stuff to go over,” she says. She walks around the front of the car and over to the driver’s side, opens her door, pauses, and stares at Jimmy over the roof. “You for real on this? It’s going to be boring.” 

“I’m for real,” Jimmy says. He taps the roof of the car with his palm. “Let’s get to it.” 

Kim is wrong, it’s not boring. The notes he’s reading out definitely are, sure, and Jimmy mispronounces most of the Latin terms and even struggles with half of the long English words—though the barely legible scrawl isn’t much help. But his inability to read works like a quiz for Kim, who has to figure out what he means by “doctrine of promiscuous flappers” and “Waffles v. Wafflehouse”.

And yeah, the traffic is slow and sluggish, filled with angry commuters cutting each other off. 

But it’s not boring. Jimmy leans back in the passenger seat and listens to Kim tap the steering wheel and hum as she thinks. When he’s not reading he looks over at her, watching the way the Albuquerque sun stripes her face as they pass buildings and trees and lampposts, striations of bright light that drift up from her chin and dissolve into her blonde hair. 

When the squat buildings of the UNM campus appear before them, it feels like no time has passed at all. A traffic light turns amber and Kim shifts down through the gears and draws to a gentle stop. Jimmy finishes the sentence he’s deciphering and looks up at the decorative University of New Mexico sign across the intersection. “Anywhere’s fine,” he says. “The hotel’s about a fifteen minute walk from here.”

“The Ramada, right?” Kim asks. 

“Yep,” Jimmy says. 

Kim taps on the steering wheel with her forefinger, then glances down at the pile of papers on his lap. “I can drop you,” she says. The light turns green. Kim shifts gears and smiles. “Keep reading.”


	4. Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill

Kim’s not in the breakroom the next morning. Jimmy arrives early as usual, but for the first time he has to put the coffee on himself—a task almost more complicated than anything else he’s had to learn in the job so far. He fumbles with the machine and spills coffee grounds everywhere, and he’s only just finished cleaning it up when the door opens.

“Hey, you out late celebrating?” Jimmy says, face breaking into a smile as he turns and sees— 

Chuck. 

Jimmy grins wider. “Chuck! Sorry—thought you were someone else.” 

“Jimmy,” Chuck says. He steps into the breakroom and looks around curiously, taking in the kitchenette, lockers, and table. “This is nice.”

“Yeah, isn’t it?” Jimmy says warmly, as he finally pours himself a coffee. He gestures to the machine. “Want a cup?” 

“No, thank you.” Chuck peers closely at the mailroom noticeboard (latest addition: _PLEASE wash plates before putting away!!!_ in Ron’s ugly scrawl) then straightens up again. He’s holding his cellphone in one hand, and he glances at it for a moment before turning to Jimmy. “Have you had any luck finding an apartment?” 

“Yep, all signed up and good to go,” Jimmy says, taking a seat at the table. “Went with the Beachcomber like we talked about. Next time you see me, I’m gonna be rocking that dark orange, Cary-Grant-in- _To-Catch-a-Thief_ tan.” He sips his coffee. “Hey, thanks again for the help. I’ll pay you back.” 

Chuck waves a dismissive hand. 

“And thank Rebecca for me, too,” Jimmy says. He tries to look extra sincere—and then hates that he’s always _trying_ to look sincere around Chuck, like he’s worried his real emotions aren’t genuine enough. 

“I’ll let her know,” Chuck says, brushing some invisible lint off his sleeve. His lips pull downward, then he glances back at Jimmy. “You had a good night, then?” 

Jimmy gives a small smile. He studies Chuck for a moment, then says, “She’s great, Chuck. She’s really great. You did good.” 

Chuck’s lips twitch, and he nods. “We _have_ been married for five years.” 

“All right, all right,” Jimmy says, chuckling and holding up his hands. He watches Chuck for another long moment. His brother looks wide awake, fresh and alert, his hair neatly combed and his dark blue suit immaculate. Jimmy can tell the fabric is expensive, more expensive than Chuck usually shells out for. 

Then Chuck’s cellphone rings. Chuck lets out his breath and brings it to his ear, waving a hand to Jimmy as he turns and walks out the door. “Yes? No, I’m here. I’m on my way. Tell Gurnstetter if he doesn’t…” 

Jimmy sinks into his hard chair and takes another sip of his coffee. He’s never known his brother not to be busy, never known him to sit back with his feet up and drink a beer or watch a movie. Maybe when Jimmy was a kid…but the memories are hazy at the edges. Or maybe not even memories at all, just photographs. 

Henry walks into the breakroom next. “Was that Mr. McGill?” he asks, peering back over his shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “He come around often?”

Henry shakes his head. “He and Hamlin Senior stop by at Christmas to deliver the bonuses. Santa hats and everything. Haven't seen much of him otherwise." He scratches his face. “Started in seventy-nine, so what’s that, thirteen years? I think they like me because I have no ambition.” 

Jimmy laughs, and then feels a little guilty. He wishes he knew enough about Henry to make a joke—no, come on, they love you for your karaoke at the holiday parties!—but he doesn’t. All Jimmy’s learned about Henry so far is that he’s bony and middle-aged and doesn’t wear a wedding ring.

Like the old man with the yellow dog in Chuck’s neighbourhood, Jimmy can see himself in Henry, if he tries. A version of himself where he lets all the work and days of the mailroom wear away at his rough edges—the copy machines like millstones smoothing him down until he, too, is content. Content to be bony and middle-aged and ringless. 

The others show up at seven o’clock, and Kim among them. She’s almost late, in fact. Jimmy tries to catch her eye, but the morning mail arrives with her, and they’re all swept along in sorting it and distributing it between the carts for delivery. Ron collects the mail for the name partners separately, eyeing each envelope as if he’s party to some secret the others aren’t, some important and pressing business going on in the towers upstairs. He sniffs proudly as he departs.

Kim and Henry wheel off the rest of the mail, and Jimmy and Burt are left downstairs with not much to do, for once. Jimmy busies himself in the stock room, lining up boxes of windowed envelopes so the edges are flush. After a few minutes, Burt strolls in. He leans against the wall and chuckles. 

“We’re not used to having the extra man, to be honest,” Burt says. He picks up a ball of rubber bands and tosses it to Jimmy, who catches it. “We’ve been managing with the four of us for months. Since Nate passed the bar and moved on up. He’s a first year associate now,” Burt adds, almost proudly. 

“You studying, too?” Jimmy asks, throwing the ball back. He’s never seen Burt with any books or notebooks. 

“Nah,” Burt says. “I’m taking a year or two to save up some money, and then I’ll put in for the scholarship program here. I talked to Mr. Hamlin and he said it looked promising.” Burt tosses the rubber band ball between his hands for a moment then throws it back to Jimmy. “You?”

Jimmy fumbles the ball. He has to fish it out from behind a row of archive boxes, and when he turns back Burt is looking at him curiously. “Me?” Jimmy asks. 

“Come on, you’re smart, you picked those copy machines up pretty quick,” Burt says, catching the next throw. “Why not?” 

Jimmy wonders what Burt’s heard about his past, if anything.

The man’s eyes are wide and innocent-looking as he waits for Jimmy’s answer, rolling the rubber band ball between the palms of his hands.

Jimmy gestures for a pass, then catches it. "Just not for me,” he says. “Hey, I heard this story: a lawyer wakes up in hospital wonders why all the blinds in his room are drawn…” 

Burt’s face lights up. “Go on, then.”

“Nurse’s like, sorry, there’s a fire over the street, and we didn’t want you to think you’d died!” 

Burt snickers. “Hah. Good one.”

Then they hear the chimes of the elevator, and an assistant comes down with a stack of papers to photocopy and collate. Burt wanders off to help him, and Jimmy is left alone in the storeroom. He peels a single rubber band off the ball, and stretches it around his splayed fingers, bouncing his hands against the tension. When Burt calls for him a few minutes later, Jimmy curls the rubber band around his thumb and forefinger like a gun. 

“Stick ‘em,” he says, training it on a row of archives boxes. 

Then he fires off the rubber band with a snap, and leaves. 

* * *

Jimmy finally sees Kim as she’s heading into the breakroom for lunch. “Hey!” he calls, jogging to catch up with her. “Hey, Kim. So?” 

Kim stops and looks at him. “So?”

“So?!” Jimmy repeats, gesturing helplessly. “Did you pass your test—your review, or whatever? Come _on_ , how’d you do?” 

Kim opens her locker and rifles through her bag for something. Her voice emerges from behind the door: “Terribly.”

“What?!” Jimmy slams the palm of his hand into the wall. “What? No!” 

“I only got an eighty,” says her muffled voice.

“Is that…bad?” he asks softly. 

There’s a long silence, and then Kim closes her locker door, and he sees she’s grinning. “It would be, but nobody else got above a sixty-three!” 

Jimmy laughs, huffing out his breath. “Jesus, Kim! Don’t play me like that.” 

“I wasn’t,” Kim says, brushing past him and heading towards the kitchenette. “An eighty _would_ be terrible on the final test. It’s really not good enough.” 

Jimmy rolls his eyes. “Come _on_.” 

“All right,” she says. “So maybe I didn’t do terribly.”

“There ya go!” Jimmy says, pointing at her. “I knew you’d ace it. And hey—” as Kim reaches for the coffee pot “—hey, listen, I completely fucked up that machine this morning without you, let me buy you a proper one from the cart upstairs instead.” He raises his eyebrows. “You know, to celebrate!”

Kim stares at him, her lips twitching at the corners. 

“We gotta celebrate your shitty eighty per cent, Kim! What even is that, anyway, an A?”

She frowns. “What? It’s a B minus. It’s a _low_ B minus.” 

Jimmy holds up his hands. “You think I ever did that well at school? Please. Come on, let’s go celebrate.” 

“All right, all right,” Kim says, putting down the coffee pot. “Let’s go, then.”

She follows him out of the breakroom. Jimmy hops on the balls of his feet and spins, walking backwards across the mailroom floor. He taps his palm into the loose fist of his other hand and makes a hollow, pucking sound. “So why the no-show this morning? Out drinking with your much dumber friends?” 

“Hah,” Kim says. She pulls the door to the landing and holds it open for him. 

“Not drinking?” Jimmy says, acting shocked as he moves past her. He thumbs the elevator call button, then turns to Kim as she joins him at his side. 

“I went in early to talk with the professor,” Kim says. “We discussed the review as a class afterwards, it’s a learning exercise, you know. But I had a few more questions.” 

“‘Course,” Jimmy says, as the elevator arrives and they step inside. “This guy must be good, coming in at the crack of dawn.”

“She’s great, yes,” Kim says. “I think she thinks she’s Sidney Poitier.”

Jimmy grins. “Hope you’re ready to sing her a song at the end of the year.”

“Oh, I _am_ ,” Kim says dramatically. The elevator arrives on the ground floor, and they step out into a HHM lobby in full swing: people walking to and fro, or gathering in loose groups for fast-paced conversation. The sound of fingers hammering keys punctuates the trill of distant telephones as Jimmy and Kim cross the lobby and exit through the main doors. 

It’s a beautiful day out, the huge blue sky flecked with patchy clouds, the sun hot but comfortable. The trees are starting to come back into their leaves, and early spring blossoms are appearing in the well-tended flower beds. 

There’s a coffee cart on a grassy verge near the entrance. Jimmy orders two drip coffees and hands over a couple of bucks, then turns to Kim. She’s staring up at the sky as if she’s forgotten what it looks like—but then Jimmy notices her lips moving slightly, tracing around silent words.

“Hey!” he says. 

Kim’s head flicks downwards and she frowns at him. 

“Stop running over whatever contract law mumbo jumbo you’re memorizing and enjoy the sunshine,” he says. “We’re celebrating, okay?” 

“Not contract law,” Kim says. “I’ve moved back to criminal.” 

“Oh, carry on then,” Jimmy says, but Kim smiles and watches the barista make their coffees instead. Jimmy would bet good money some obscure legal precedents are still running through her mind on loop, and he chuckles. When their coffees are ready, he takes them, and gestures to a nearby bench. 

“Here,” he says, handing Kim her coffee, “Congrats on the B minus.”

“Thank you,” Kim says, sitting down. She cradles her cup in two hands and stares away from him, towards the flow of people entering and leaving HHM, a swift-moving stream. “I actually knew the answers to the things I got wrong. I just…blanked.”

Jimmy sips his coffee and tries to think of the right thing to say. “I can quiz you more,” he offers. “If that helps. For next time.”

Kim turns to face him. 

“You’d be doing me a favor, really,” Jimmy says, shrugging. “I need to make a friend in Albuquerque somehow. Burt’s a kid, Ron’s gross, and Henry’s like, almost fifty. It’s slim pickings.”

“Gee, thanks,” Kim says wryly. 

“I got nowhere else to go,” Jimmy says, channeling _An Officer and a Gentleman._ “Kim, I got nowhere else to go!”

Kim laughs, bright and musical. She leans down, opens her bag, and pulls a neatly wrapped sandwich from her bag and unpeels the paper, then holds it out to Jimmy. “Want half?”

It looks homemade, chicken salad on whole wheat.

“Go on,” Kim says, inching it closer. “Without your help I only would’ve got a 78 on that review. _Maybe_ a 79.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy says warmly, picking up half the sandwich. He takes a bite—it’s much better than vending machine chips. Across the grass, Chuck emerges from the HHM entrance, mid-conversation with the Rolex-wearing Carl Vernon. The two men stop near the coffee cart, but don’t order anything. 

Kim folds the paper sandwich-wrapper between her fingers, creasing the edge sharply. “We have actual exams coming up after spring break.”

Jimmy swallows his mouthful of sandwich. “Hey, spring break, though!”

“Yes, spring break—a week of working here as usual but with extra cramming for midterms,” Kim says blandly. “Woohoo.”

“Woohoo,” Jimmy repeats, smiling at Kim then taking another bite of his sandwich. 

Chuck gives Vernon a fatherly pat on the shoulder, then walks away. Rolex Vernon stares after him, grinning, then glances about and spots Jimmy and Kim. His face lights up, and he strides over, stopping right before their bench. He looks much healthier today—no sweat patches around his collar or dark bags under his eyes.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Vernon says, gesturing for them both to stay seated. “No, don’t let me interrupt your lunch. I wanted to apologize for losing my temper over that accident with my assistant. I go a bit nuts towards the end of a big case, heh!” His laugh is short and almost ironic.

Jimmy stares up at the man grinning in front of him. “So it turned out okay, then?” 

“Okay would be an understatement,” Vernon says, waving proudly at the beautiful weather as if he’s the one responsible. “Papadoumian went in my favour, and she must’ve been really raving about me because I got a new case out of it. Was just telling Mr. McGill. High profile stuff, very hush hush, very exciting. I imagine there’ll be discovery coming in today, so brace yourself because Acevedo is going to try to drown me.” 

“Congratulations,” Jimmy offers, but Vernon doesn’t even seem to hear him. 

“Well, hey—I gotta dash, but sorry again there, Jim,” Vernon says. He nods at Kim, then wanders towards another group of people, evidently looking to share his good news with anyone who’ll listen. Very hush hush indeed.

Kim scrunches up her sandwich wrapper and downs her last bit of coffee. “We'd better get back to it if he’s right about that discovery.” 

Jimmy nods. He takes the trash from Kim and throws it in the bin beside him, then stands. “Thanks for the sandwich. And I mean it, let me quiz you again.” He throws out his arms and twists his face up and yells, “ _I got nowhere else to go!”_

A few people glance over in concern, and Kim waves them down with a placating hand. “All right, all right. Don’t make me regret it, Richard Gere,” she says sternly, but then she laughs, and the two of them head back down to the mailroom. 

* * *

The first lot of discovery for Rolex Vernon’s new case arrives that afternoon, and at first Jimmy is underwhelmed when only seven narrow containers about the size of shoeboxes are delivered to the mailroom. Underwhelmed, and then confused, when everyone else around him lets loose a cacophony of groans. 

“Oh no,” Burt says. “Get ready to weep for the trees.” 

Henry picks up the first box and opens it to reveal a line of tightly-packed floppy disks. 

“I know Vernon said Acevedo wanted to bury him, but this is a declaration of war,” Kim says. 

“What’s going on?” Jimmy asks, looking between everyone. 

Henry sighs. “Mr. Vernon and the poor folks in doc review need physical copies. It’s a massive bottleneck.”

Kim walks off with a box and turns on the two computers linked up with the copy machines. “Let’s get started, then,” she says, grimly. She picks up the first floppy disk and slides it into the machine. Hits a few buttons and waits a minute, and then the printer beside the PC starts spitting out paper. Kim peers down at the pages and lets out a hushed noise. 

“Everything okay?” Henry asks, and he and Jimmy approach with the remaining boxes. 

Kim’s eyes flick over the pages as they emerge from the printer. “Isn’t Stan Westerbrook the Channel Four anchor?” 

Henry nods. “Stan and Trisha Westerbrook. ‘All the News You Need at Six’.” 

Jimmy can picture them now, laughing fakely on his hotel TV. Perfect white smiles and dyed hair talking about Bush and Clinton and Super Tuesday. 

“Not married for much longer, it looks like,” Henry adds, gesturing with his box of floppy disks. A handwritten label just reads: _Finances_. 

“The money they have? They could drag this out for a long time,” Kim says. She frowns, and Jimmy can almost see the calculations running through her head—the loss of anticipated study time. She breathes out slowly and closes her eyes for a moment, then settles down into the computer chair and starts queueing up files for the printer. The monitor casts a soft blue light on her face, reflecting like pinpricks in her eyes. 

And, sure enough, they all spend the rest of the day flat out, staying on until after six o’clock, until after the light beyond the high windows fades from the oranges of sunset down to darkness. Kim leaves before the rest of the group, making apologies about her night class, but the others just wave her away kindly, and Jimmy smiles and calls, “Congratulations on that B minus!” as she rushes out to the elevators. She holds up a hand to him in farewell. 

By the time they finish for the evening, Jimmy and the others have filled a couple of dozen archive boxes, papers stacked in painstakingly-numbered lever-arch files and then squeezed into the boxes like sardines. Jimmy pays more attention to the content of the pages than usual as he’s assembling them. It’s mostly dry financial statements, but even those contain gems: high-end sports cars, expensive holidays, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to own a forty-foot yacht in the middle of landlocked Albuquerque. Maybe Stan Westerbrook can sail it in the couple’s enormous in-ground pool, installed just three years ago. 

Jimmy’s never known anyone with that kind of money. There was a time, after his dad got the store but before it started doing badly, when his mom would buy brand name products from the supermarket instead of the generic stuff. His parents had even started talking about moving into a bigger place. But of course it didn’t work out, and his mom's still in the same townhouse as he was born in, and last time he visited she still ate the store-brand muesli for her breakfast every morning. 

Chuck must have money, Jimmy thinks, but he doesn’t show it off to the world. Not like Howard, whose suit and car and hair stink of the stuff. But Chuck—Chuck has nice suits, and a nice car, and a nice house in the suburbs, and he’s not flamboyant about it. Jimmy thinks that that’s all he’d want money for too, really: some nice suits and a car and a house. 

Well, maybe the suits and the car and the house _and_ the in-ground pool, if he can swing it. 

If he can swing it. 


	5. Two Fools Tavern

Over the next few days, the atmosphere in the Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill offices grows increasingly tense. As Jimmy wheels his mail cart through the cubicles of the upper floors, he overhears snippets of strained conversation, and the name Gurnstetter is paired with his brother’s more and more frequently. The workload from Rolex Vernon’s new divorce case doesn’t subside either, and the heightened press attention on the law firm seems to unsettle everyone except Vernon himself—who Jimmy more than once sees speaking to news crews outside the HHM building and gesturing emphatically.

Or maybe the mood just seems tense because Jimmy can’t stop seeing the tension in Kim’s shoulders, a tension that’s tightening day on day, like a guitar string tuned higher and higher until at a single touch it might snap. 

The mailroom staff, bar Kim and her law school commitments, stay late every night until Friday, and Jimmy’s getting sick of arriving at dawn and leaving after dusk. He takes his lunch outside when he can, but it’s not enough, and the thin high windows of the mailroom look more like the gaps in a jail cell with each passing hour. 

But then, on Friday, the work lets up. Jimmy hears some good news he doesn’t understand about Chuck and Gurnstetter, and, as he does the afternoon delivery, he sees people patting Chuck on the shoulder or peeking into his brother’s office with a smile on their face. Acevedo, Trisha Westerbrook’s attorney, slows down the relentless deluge of discovery documents too, so, as five o’clock rolls around, Jimmy stares up at the sunlight streaming through the windows and smiles. 

He’s grabbing his bag when Kim joins him in the breakroom. She stops before the line of lockers and reaches out to open hers, but then just tips her forehead forward and rests her head against the metal. 

“Hey,” Jimmy says softly. 

Kim opens one eye and peers sideways at him. “Hey.” 

Jimmy leans sideways against the lockers. “You doing okay, Spencer Tracy?”

“Oh no,” Kim says, and she lets out a little huffing laugh. “What this time?”

Behind him, Jimmy hears someone enter the breakroom, and he steps aside for a moment to let Burt grab his backpack and say goodnight to them both on his way out. “ _Judgment at Nuremberg_ ,” Jimmy says, finally, falling back against the lockers. 

“Ouch,” Kim says, closing her eyes again. 

“What? It’s perfect! He’s old, he’s cute, he’s got those glasses,” Jimmy says, counting off on his fingers. “He helped post-accident Monty Clift get through his scene.”

“But he’s a _judge_.” 

“So? You can get your degree, pass the bar, practice for twenty or thirty years, and then retire and become a no-nonsense TV judge.”

Kim chuckles, and pushes back off her locker. As she opens it and grabs her bag, Henry enters, and he nods to them both and wishes them a good weekend. Jimmy watches the older man go, then turns back to Kim, who’s staring intently inside her bag as if it contains the answers to her upcoming midterms.

“Hey,” Jimmy says again, and she looks up at him. He smiles. “It’s Friday, it’s happy hour, let’s go get a drink.” 

Kim lets out a long wistful sigh. 

Jimmy jerks his head towards the door. “Come on.” 

“I can’t, I really can’t,” Kim says. “I don’t have the time.”

“Hmm, right, of course,” Jimmy says, and then he smiles winningly. “So how about if we make it a law drink?”

“What?”

“You know, a law drink. So you won’t _really_ be taking a break from the law.” 

Kim scrunches her face at him. “And how are you going to make it a ‘law’ drink?”

“Hey, wouldja trust me?” Jimmy says. When Kim sighs and smiles, he claps his hands in delight. “Fantastic! Let’s go—ah, okay, one problem, I don’t know any bars around here, or anywhere in Albuquerque, unless you count the Ramada one, but it’s depressing as hell there—and, well, problem two, you’re going to have to drive us—” 

“Jimmy?” Kim says, slinging her back over her shoulder. 

He looks at her with raised eyebrows. 

“Shut up,” Kim says, and she leads him out the door. 

* * *

Kim and Jimmy end up at a mock Irish pub near the university. Jimmy orders a pitcher of beer, and they sit together at a table in the corner. The place is filled with young college students, laughing and chattering excitedly about the start of spring break. 

“Hey, look,” Jimmy says, nodding to the TV above the bar. 

On the monitor, the twin tanned faces of Stan and Trisha Westerbrook smile out at them, the couple talking animatedly about Ross Perot. 

“They’re doing a good job of faking it,” Kim says earnestly, twisting around to stare at the television. “The whole city already knows about the divorce.” 

“I’d do a good job of faking it, too, if I got paid that much.” Jimmy takes a sip of his beer, then swallows it quickly and points. “Oh hey, look, they’re bantering now!” 

Trisha Westerbrook’s lips peel back in a laugh, and she lays a manicured hand on Stan’s forearm. 

“Charming,” Kim says, turning back to face Jimmy. 

“I wonder who’s gonna get the four-hundred-grand yacht,” Jimmy says. “Would be a shame to have to sell it. It’s so, you know, _useful_.” 

But Kim frowns. “I’m more worried about the kid.”

“There’s a kid?”

“Six-year-old daughter,” Kim says. “The poor girl spends most of her day with the nanny, but seems like it’s turning into a pissing contest over custody now.” 

Jimmy has another sip of beer. He stares at the fake-looking couple laughing on the TV set. “Damn,” he says. 

“Yeah,” Kim says. She takes a long drink, then looks at him assessingly. After a moment, she taps her hand on the table, palm-down. “But enough of that. You have some explaining to do.”

“I do?” Jimmy asks. 

“Yes,” Kim says, but there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her eyes. She gestures at the table. “How is this a ‘law’ drink?”

Jimmy laughs, then he leans forward. “We’re talking about a case, aren’t we?” 

“Jimmy.”

He shrugs. “I dunno. Hamlin Hamlin and McGill. You’re drinking with a McGill. Osmosis?” 

Kim rolls her eyes. “You are so not Charles McGill,” she says, but she says it warmly, and he watches her, unsure how to reply. She stares back at him, then slowly says, “And you are so not what we expected.”

Something hot grips the back of Jimmy’s neck, and he unconsciously pulls his hands in closer to his body. “Oh yeah?” he asks warily. 

Kim takes another drink. “The boss’s brother… We thought you were starting in the mailroom as a statement against nepotism after Hamlin Senior handed Howard his job on a silver platter.” The hint of vitriol in the last few words takes Jimmy a little by surprise, but Kim continues, “We thought you were going to put in the hours for a while, you know, _just_ long enough until they could move you on up and eventually stick that extra ‘M’ on the end of the firm.”

The conclusion is painfully clear to Jimmy now that he hears it put to him, and he remembers Kim’s surprise last week as they’d smoked together in the parking garage, when he’d said he didn’t understand Chuck’s love of the law. 

“I think you set everyone’s minds at ease that first day, though,” Kim says, watching him closely. “You told that story of you and Chuck stealing the neighbor’s apples and then getting chased by the Rottweiler. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing an upcoming partner would tell the mailroom staff. Did you mean to do that?”

“No,” Jimmy says. “I didn’t even realize that’s how you’d think of me.” He shifts in his chair, and takes another long drink of his beer, then adds in a low voice: “That story wasn’t true, anyway.”

“No kidding,” Kim says, wryly. 

Jimmy lets out an awkward laugh. 

Kim shrugs. “But you told it well.”

“I mean—Chuck wasn’t there, it was me and my buddy Marco. And we didn’t steal apples, we broke in and stole the old guy’s stamp collection and pawned it for, like, two hundred bucks. Damn Rottweiler really almost bit me, though!” 

Kim laughs brightly. “The apples did seem a little Huck Finn.”

“Hey, I borrow from the best,” Jimmy says. He studies Kim as she takes another sip of her beer and looks around at the celebrating college students. 

He can tell that she isn’t going to ask the real question, he somehow knows she’s never going to push on that door—the door that leads to the past: to Cicero and Marco and Chet. Maybe because she knows that he’ll feel like he _has_ to answer, and she doesn’t want to take that choice away from him. 

So he tells her. “Chuck got me out of jail.”

And, to her credit, Kim doesn’t look nearly as horrified as she could have. Her eyes soften, and she waits.

“Up in Cicero. Cook County. It’s a long story,” Jimmy says. Across the bar, there's a loud cry from a group of students as they all down a round of shots. Jimmy shifts in his chair. “It’s long,” he says quietly, “and boring, and really it’s more embarrassing than anything else.” 

Kim raises her eyebrows expectantly. 

“I did a lot of bad stuff, you know. Stealing some old geezer’s prized stamp collection included.” He gives a faint laugh, then draws in a deep breath. 

“Jimmy,” Kim says, and her eyes grow soft. 

He stares at her.

“You don’t need to tell me,” she says quietly. 

“No, no, it’s not that,” Jimmy says. He grips his beer and taps his fingernails on the glass. “It’s just—” He huffs, looks down, then meets her gaze. “It’s just…” 

Kim waits, her face still. 

So he tells her. “I took a shit through some guy’s sunroof.”

Kim almost manages to hold it together. She stares at him, lips quivering, cheeks trembling—and then bursts into violent laughter, big loud guffaws that have the other patrons staring over at her, and something unpleasant and shameful uncoils in Jimmy’s stomach. 

He swallows, taking a sip of his beer, watching her grip her chest.

“I’m s—I’m sorry,” she gasps, words faint through her laughter. “I just—” she says, reaching up to wipe tears from her face. She forces air out her mouth, a calming breath, then meets his eyes and says gently, “I’m sorry, Jimmy.” 

But her gaze is kind, not full of the disgust he expected, and suddenly the shame in him breaks, and he starts laughing too, slowly at first and then louder, until the two of them are cackling together over their half-empty beer glasses, laughing and laughing until they run out of breath and have to stop, winded. 

And Jimmy thinks that it’s the first time in a long time he’s had a great night out without conning anybody, and he thinks that maybe he can do this forever. 

* * *

Though Kim had looked much more relaxed when Jimmy said goodnight to her outside the Irish pub that Friday, by the time Monday morning rolls around the tension seems to have returned to her shoulders tenfold. She’s so fixated on her textbook that at first she doesn’t notice Jimmy arrive at all, and then her distracted, monosyllabic answers let him know to leave her be. He thinks of all the spring breakers down in Florida, crowding beneath the sun along long stretches of white sand, as Kim spends her mornings and evenings and lunch breaks hunkered beneath the fluorescent lights and prison windows of the basement breakroom. 

“So how’s it feel to look into your own future?” Jimmy asks Burt over lunch one day, as the two sit at the kitchen table opposite Kim’s textbook fort. 

Burt takes a painful-looking swallow of his ham sandwich. 

“And this’s only second year, right, Kim?” Jimmy asks, raising his voice a little. 

Kim either doesn’t hear or chooses not to respond. Her eyes trace the pages before her so intensely Jimmy’s surprised they haven’t cut grooves in the paper, thousands upon thousands of horizontal slices, ribbons of _liability_ and _provocation_ and _inchoate crimes._

And Slippin’ Jimmy, for once, comes up short. He’s only so much help in reading her notes back to her, and he can sense Kim’s growing frustration with any moment that she feels she isn’t maximizing study potential. But he can’t think of anything else to offer. It’s his natural inclination to look for a shortcut, the easy-way-out where Kim instead picks hard work, but the only thing he can think is to ask Chuck, and Chuck’s never been one to offer handouts even when it’s in his power to give them. Other than taking Jimmy under his wing and into his shiny glass and Hamlindigo blue world. 

That last is a thought that particularly strikes Jimmy when, later that week, Chuck invites him for lunch in the café adjacent to the HHM lobby. He suddenly can’t remember if he’s really thanked his brother yet or not, but he’s sure that the right time to do it isn't over day-old cabinet sandwiches. 

“This looks nice,” Chuck says, pointing at Jimmy’s trimmed hair. “Still a bit long, but…” He smiles. “A real job suits you.”

Jimmy feels a rush of warmth. “Thanks,” he says. He tears off a piece of his crust and pops it into his mouth. 

Chuck unfolds his paper napkin and lays it on his lap. “Howard said you had a chat last week, too.”

“Uh—yeah,” Jimmy says. He glances at his own napkin—already scrunched up through general fidgetiness. “Yeah, he seems like a good guy.”

“He is,” Chuck says. “And a real credit to his father.”

Jimmy nods thoughtfully. “You tutored him through law school, right?” 

“That’s right,” Chuck says. 

“Is it really as hard as it looks?” Jimmy asks.

A strange look passes over Chuck’s face. “What do you mean?”

“Oh! No, I know how much you worked,” Jimmy says, chuckling and holding up his hands. “It’s just—Kim’s got her midterms next week and I’m worried she’s gonna implode from stress before she can even sit them.”

“Kim?” Chuck repeats. 

“Sorry, my friend Kim,” Jimmy says, and then he adds, “in the mailroom.”

“Ah, right, Ms. Wexler,” Chuck says. “Well, she’s very promising, I’m sure she’ll do fine.” 

Jimmy nods, and there's a beat of silence before he says, “But how did you tutor Howard, did you—” 

“There are no shortcuts, Jimmy,” Chuck says, and Jimmy hates how transparent he is before his brother. “If Ms. Wexler needs assistance, I’m more than happy to make time before her exams, but I’m sure she’s got things well enough in hand.” 

Jimmy chews slowly, swallows, then nods. The two sit in silence for a little while, and Jimmy looks around at the other patrons, professionals in suits having serious discussions over their midday coffees. Others have yellow legal pads with them and are flicking through sheets of handwritten notes as they eat almost automatically. An intense woman at the far end makes Jimmy think of a future Kim—she’s in her sixties, maybe, and she taps a pen on her legal pad as her eyes flicker back and forth determinedly. 

“Listen, Jimmy.” Chuck’s tone is sharp, and Jimmy turns back to face him. Chuck has pushed his plate away, and his fingers are laced before him on the table. He looks, Jimmy thinks, like a judge. His next words arrive with fitting precision: “Mom called.” 

Jimmy swallows his half-chewed bite of sandwich, his mouth suddenly dry. 

“She says you haven’t spoken to her since prison.”

Brown rings mark the inside of his coffee mug like high water marks. Jimmy reaches for the cup and takes a sip, downing the gritty dregs, grimacing. 

“She rang me on Saturday,” Chuck continues. “She’s doing well. She wants to hear from you.”

Jimmy nods slowly. He sets his mug back down on the table gently. 

“I told her I would ask you to call,” Chuck says, and Jimmy meets his eyes. Chuck looks flat, his gaze benign. 

“Okay,” Jimmy says. 

“Good,” Chuck says. He taps his interlaced hands on the table as if arriving at a verdict, then adds, “She’s all alone, Jimmy. She worries.”

“I know.” 

“All right,” Chuck says. He stands, shrugs on his suit jacket back and then tidily pushes in his chair. Looks down at Jimmy, who’s still sitting. “I’m glad to see you doing well, Jimmy. Tell Ms. Wexler good luck from me.”

Jimmy nods and watches his brother exit the café. The other patrons incline their heads as Chuck passes, offering him congratulations beneath white smiles and bright eyes. 

* * *

Jimmy sits on the edge of his hotel bed and stares down at the phone in his hand. The cord is looped and tangled over itself, and the numbers on the handset are worn down. The _#1_ button is the most worn of all, the prefix to dial out of the hotel. He hovers his forefinger over it tentatively, like a wild animal waiting for the right moment to pounce. 

It’s Sunday afternoon. Jimmy spent the morning looking at furniture in second-hand stores, putting in orders and arranging deliveries for his move-in date. He found a small table and a couple of chairs, and got a good deal on a little television. And he passed over the racks of colorfully-patterned shirts that seemed almost to wave at him from across each store, as if each owner wheeled them out just before Jimmy’s arrival.

Jimmy glances wistfully at the George Sanders autobiography on the bed beside him, which he picked up at last store and that he’s spent the afternoon reading, and then looks back at the phone. He inhales sharply, dials one, and then punches in his mother’s phone number. 

Ruth McGill answers on the fourth ring. 

“Hey, Mom,” Jimmy says softly. 

He hears a rustle of fabric as she sits down, then she says, “Hello, honey.”

Jimmy stares vaguely at an empty corner of his hotel room, where the old wallpaper is peeling away from the wainscoting. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“Oh no, that’s all right,” she says, light but transparent. “I know you’re busy.”

Not something he’s used to hearing. “Yeah,” he says. 

“Where are you calling from?” 

“The Ramada. It’s—it’s nice. But Chuck helped me with an apartment, Mom. I’m moving in in a couple of weeks.” He hears a scratching in the background. “Is that Delilah?” 

“Oh, yes, you can hear that? Yes, she wants to go outside,” his mother says fondly. “Dee, sweetie, I’m on the phone.” 

Jimmy gives a soft chuckle. 

“If I get up to let her out she’ll only change her mind,” Ruth says, but then Jimmy hears rustling fabric again and the sound of a sliding door. A little bell tinkles distantly as the cat trots outside. 

“How is she?” Jimmy asks. 

“She’s good,” his mother says. “A bit slow moving around these days. But, you know, she’s getting old.” 

Jimmy hums. “And how’s my mom?”

“Oh, she’s good,” Ruth says again, and Jimmy can hear the smile in her voice. “A bit slow moving around these days, but, you know, she’s getting old.” 

Jimmy laughs warmly, and it feels like being tucked into bed on a winter night in Cicero. 

“So tell me about this job,” his mother says. 

He leans back on top of the covers, phone gripped to his ear, and stares up at the ceiling. His gaze traces at the discolored paint around the fixture of the ceiling fan. “It’s strange,” he says, finally. “I don’t know. I haven’t screwed anything up yet. But I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?” Ruth asks, voice soft over the miles between them.

Jimmy stares at the ceiling. His mother doesn’t say anything else, and he breathes, letting the light bulb above him burn holes in his eyes. “Everyone else around me knows exactly who they are and what they’re doing here.”

More silence, but in his mind, his mother is nodding as she listens, her eyes gentle and sympathetic.

“I mean, Chuck—” Jimmy laughs weakly “—Chuck’s got it all figured out, of course, and everyone else here is a big shot lawyer. Even in the mailroom, my—uh, one of people I work with, she’s at law school too, and she works so _hard_ , Mom.” He lets out another long breath. “How can people work so hard?” The image of his father packing up shelves in his closed-down store floats into his mind, and he’s sure his mother’s thinking of it, too.

“You’ll figure it out,” Ruth says, eventually. He hears her stand, and the raking grind of the sliding door and then the tinkle of Delilah coming back inside. “Have a good walk, honey?” he hears her croon. 

“How?” Jimmy asks softly, eyes burning with the bright light. 

“Trust me, will you?” His mother sits again, another soft rustle of cloth. “I’m old now, Jimmy, you should listen to me. Start with the job. Your brother’s very proud of you, you know.” 

Something unfolds in Jimmy’s stomach, and he wants to ask how she knows, if Chuck really told her that. But he doesn’t say anything.

They talk for a little longer about everyday things, about his mother’s struggles with her vegetable garden and with the neighbor's cats. Ruth’s happy to talk about herself, but he can sense her waiting to see if he’ll add anything else, and he can sense the moment she gives up. He tells her he loves her, and then says goodbye, setting the phone down with a gentle click, wishing he could see her face. 

* * *

When the phone rings again later that night, Jimmy’s immediate reaction is panic. He glances at the electronic clock on the bedside table: it’s after two in the morning. The phone trills again, and he reaches out a blind hand, fumbling for the receiver then holding it to his ear. 

“Hello?” he says, voice thick with sleep. 

Silence from the other end of the line. 

Jimmy clears his throat, pulse thudding beneath his skin. “…Hello?”

“Sorry, did I wake you up?” a voice, crisp and awake and— 

“Kim?” Jimmy says. He shifts, sitting upright. 

“Sorry, go back to sleep, I didn’t—” 

“No, no!” Jimmy says quickly. “I was up, I’m watching TV.” He reaches for the remote and clicks on the set; it blinks awake into a colorful infomercial, and he hops through the channels until he spots something familiar: William Holden handing Judy Holliday a stack of books. “Is everything all right?” he asks, after Kim doesn't say anything.

“Yes, it’s fine,” Kim says. “I didn’t realize the time.”

“How did you—oh, the hotel.” Jimmy says, reaching up and rubbing his eyes with one hand. 

“Right. Look, Jimmy, did you notice if I left anything in the breakroom on Friday? I just can’t—I can’t find—” Kim’s voice cuts out, and there’s a crinkling of papers. He can hear her murmuring to herself, and heavy thuds like books being shifted around. 

“Kim?” Jimmy says, and then at her silence he tries again: “Kim?”

A shifting noise. “Yes?”

“Kim, I left, like, hours before you.”

“Oh.” Kim lets out a long breath. “Damn.”

“What have you lost?” Jimmy asks. On the TV, Judy Holliday and William Holden explore the Capitol Building’s rotunda, dwarfed by enormous paintings and watched over by _The Apotheosis of Washington_.

Kim is talking so fast Jimmy almost can’t hear her. “—act versus status, uh—Robinson v. California, I think, but I can’t remember what else—something v. Texas—”

“Kim?”

“—and I can’t remember how they justified—Oh! Powell!—it has to be here somewhere—”

“Kim!” Jimmy says forcefully. 

The frantic movement on the other end of conversation slows. “Yeah?”

“I hate to ask, but when’s the exam?” 

Kim’s sigh comes crackling over the phone line. “Tomorrow.” 

Jimmy glances at the clock. It’s almost two thirty in the morning, and he doesn’t want to know what time Kim needs to be awake by. He can hear her breathing in his ear, and he settles back against the headboard and watches Bill and Judy eat ice cream. 

“Jimmy?” Kim says so quietly he almost doesn’t catch it. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “I’m here. Hey.”

Kim breathes out. “Hey.” 

He wonders if she ever really thought he’d know where her missing notes are. He tucks his arm behind his head and scratches the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. “Turn to channel twelve,” he says. “Watch a movie with me.”

Silence from the other end of the line. 

“It’s just getting to a good bit,” he presses.

“What movie?” Kim asks, but he hears her moving and the sound of a drawer opening. 

“ _Born Yesterday_.” 

“Oh, Judy Holliday…” Kim says wistfully. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, settling deeper into his pillows. Muffled voices emerge from the other end of the line, and he smiles. “Hey, I should get some glasses like hers, right?” he says. “For next time I need to read some of your incomprehensible writing.”

Kim chuckles softly. “You’d look good in them.”

On the TV, Bill Holden laughs, too, explaining his newspaper article to Judy. “I’m with her, you know,” Jimmy says. “All this Latin and fancy words, why not just say what you mean?”

“The law’s supposed to be impenetrable, Jimmy,” Kim says, a smile edging her words. “It’s how we keep the riffraff out.”

“Oh, well, that’s fine, then,” Jimmy says. They lie in silence for a while, watching the movie. Jimmy reaches over and switches off his lamp so that the only light in the room comes from the flickering black and white of the television, and a yellow haze of streetlamps that bleeds through the edges of the thin hotel curtains. He hears Kim’s breathing slow down and wonders if she’s fallen asleep. 

But then she murmurs, “What about you?” 

“Hm?” 

“What they’re talking about. Would you rather be a happy peasant or Napoleon?” 

“Me?” Jimmy says, and he scratches the back of his head again. “Napoleon, of course.”

Kim snorts, and they’re silent again for a long time. Every so often, as the characters on the screen drown in books, or argue, or kiss in the elevator, Jimmy will again wonder if Kim's finally asleep. But then he’ll hear movement, or laughter, or she’ll have some soft comment, and he’ll reply, maybe joke a little before they lapse back to silence.

But always the sound of her breathing close against his ear, in and out like the tide. If he stares straight forward at the black-and-white figures it’s almost as if Kim’s right here beside him. And part of him wishes he could say that to her right now, that he could look at her and like Judy Holliday boldly say with a smile, You’re crazy about me, aren’t you? and have her reply, like William Holden, forcefully: Yes. 

But this is as precious and as fragile to him as crystal, as a string wound to its snapping point, as small human breaths down copper wire. So he says nothing, just watches the movie and matches his exhales to hers. 

When the end title comes up, Kim sighs. 

“Will you sleep?” Jimmy asks gently. 

“I think so,” Kim says. 

Jimmy nods. “You know it all already, anyway,” he says. He switches off his television. Presses the phone close to his ear and stares at the empty black screen. “Night, Kim.” 

Kim sighs again. There’s another silence that somehow seems to stretch even longer than the others, and then Kim says, “Goodnight, Jimmy,” and the line clicks off. 


	6. Midterms

The next week passes without Jimmy seeing much of Kim at all.

She comes into HHM for a few hours each day, working without a break, clearly distracted, and then takes off in the afternoon. The others seem to understand the midterm hell this signifies, as they wish her luck on her way out. Kim barely seems to hear them. Jimmy, too, tries to talk to her, but he feels like a man tapping on the other side of a glass cage, so eventually he stays silent, wishing he could think of a way to help. 

Kim doesn’t call him at the hotel again, and Jimmy doesn’t have her number. He wonders whether he would use it if he did. He likes to hope he’d give Kim her space, but he knows that as early as Monday night he definitely would’ve caved, lying on his bed watching Billy Crystal crack jokes and _The Silence of the Lambs_ win every single award, but thinking only of how panicked Kim had sounded the night before.

Jimmy goes out for drinks with the mailroom guys one day, Wednesday or Thursday maybe.

They head to a bar near the office, where Jimmy spots some associates from HHM laughing and letting off steam, venting about their current caseload. And to hear him, Burt, and Henry talk it’s almost as if the three of them are lawyers, too—or maybe it’s just that the only thing they have in common is work. Henry’s been at the company for so long that he’s gleaned enough information about the law to sound like an expert, and he tells them about some big class action suit that George Hamlin helmed many years ago.

Jimmy listens, rolling a half dollar back and forth over his knuckles and grimacing as Henry describes the side effects of the offending cosmetic company’s products. 

Across the room, a man in a suit two sizes too big orders scotch after scotch and talks angrily into his chunky cellphone. Jimmy watches him. As Henry starts to get into the nitty-gritty of Hamlin’s class action case, Jimmy focuses instead on the businessman, straining to follow the man’s one-sided conversation and pick up enough personal information to get a read on him. Something to do with property, an investor—no, a realtor.

Jimmy flicks the half dollar off his knuckles and clutches it in his fist. Guys used to selling are sometimes the quickest people to get bought.

He doesn’t actually do anything, of course. He forces himself to tune back in to Henry’s story, and then the three of them chat for a little while longer—still work things, the kind of stuff Jimmy would have laughed about with Marco not so long ago, if he’d overheard it. Like whether it’s better to start on the fourth floor and work down, or begin on level two and go up. If it’s easier to handle Chloe getting annoyed when she hears the cart making the rounds above her, or if it’s better to start with her and in doing so piss off Aaron in the next cubicle, who likes his mail picked up at the last possible moment so there’s a chance he won’t have to deal with a response until tomorrow. 

Jimmy thinks back to sitting in the Irish pub with Kim. How they’d barely spoken of work at all, in the end. He had slowly filled in more details about his sunroof story—and he almost laughs out loud now, thinking of Kim’s face when he’d mentioned Chet’s kids in the backseat. Even after that, when they’d backed off from the personal stuff, they’d talked with a kind of easy, effervescent energy. No mailroom tips—just movies and trivia: the new scene in the restoration of _Spartacus_ and the making of _The African Queen_. 

It’s nice being out with Burt and Henry, though. Jimmy appreciates the simple, if slightly boring, comradeship, and he’s grateful to them both for bringing him into the fold so comfortably. He feels like their missing piece in some ways—sitting between the youthful energy of Burt and the middle-aged resignation of Henry.

In other ways he feels worlds apart from them both. His eyes flick again to the scotch-sipping realtor in the ill-fitting suit. 

But any night spent with friendly company outside the four walls of his room at the Ramada is a good night—and soon, before Jimmy realizes it, the week is almost over again, Friday afternoon rolling around with a late lunch break and a Kim Wexler who looks so dark-eyed and exhausted Jimmy’s amazed she’s still on her feet at all.

He finds her staring at the coffee machine in the breakroom as if she’s forgotten what it is, arms hanging limply at her sides. Jimmy slides past her and starts to brew a new batch. He thumbs the button then props his hip against the counter and watches her as the machine groans into life. 

Kim blinks a few times and looks at him, eyes bleary. 

He gives her a little smile, thin-lipped, and motions at the grumbling coffee machine. 

Kim traces his gesture with her gaze then nods. 

Twisting, he reaches up into the cupboard and pulls out a mug, one he’s seen her use before. He turns on the faucet and holds the mug under the water as it heats, slowly warming the china. He takes a clean dish towel from a drawer and dries the mug. Clasps the empty cup between his palms for a moment to make sure it’s hot, and then he fills it almost to the brim with fresh coffee and holds it out to Kim. 

Kim takes the mug from him carefully, her fingers brushing his. She raises the cup to her lips and then sips it, closing her eyes. Jimmy leans back against the counter again, the sharp edge cutting into his hip, and the two of them stand like that in silence for a long time. 

He can feel the ghost of her fingers like sunlight on his skin. 

Then Kim holds out the mug, now empty, and Jimmy takes it. He turns away. Runs the cup under the faucet again, washing it out in the sink, as behind him he hears Kim move off and open and close her locker. He rinses the mug and props it up in the dish-rack. When he turns back, Kim has left—for her last midterm, he hopes—and he stares at her closed locker for a moment before going back to work. 

That evening, halfway out the door, he stops. He returns to the mailroom and heads for the supply cupboard. Finds a new packet of Post-it notes and a black pen, then walks into the breakroom, flicking a switch and illuminating the space with guttering fluorescents. 

Jimmy scribbles something on the top Post-it note. He studies it for a moment then smiles. With a little flourish, he peels off the pink square of paper and sticks it to the front of Kim’s locker, and then he walks out the door, flicking the light-switch off and plunging the room back into darkness. 

* * *

The Post-it note is gone on Monday morning. Its absence is the first thing Jimmy notices when he steps back into the breakroom after another boring weekend wandering the streets of southern Albuquerque, past yellowing parks and strip malls. That Saturday afternoon he had found a small movie theater, and he’d sat in the dark watching Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson shoot basketballs and hustle everyone. On Sunday he had walked south, towards the airport. He’d watched the planes take off and land for hours as the sun set over the mountains. He’d felt peaceful. He’d felt like he was waiting for something. 

The second thing he notices that morning is Kim. She’s facing away from the door, head propped on her hand.

Jimmy grins. “No rest for the wicked, eh?”

Kim twists to face him in her chair and smiles. Despite his words, she looks healthier than she has in weeks—well rested and bright eyed. “Morning, Jimmy.” 

“Couldn’t you give the law books a break for a day or two?” Jimmy asks. He drops down into the seat beside her and peers over at the dense text she’s reading. “Yikes, is this contract stuff again?”

Kim closes the book and sighs. “I _did_ take a break.”

“The walk from your car to this room doesn’t count as ‘a break’,” he says, doing air quotes. 

Kim raises her eyebrows. “I also had the entire drive over.”

“Oh, well, the drive here? That’s just excessive,” Jimmy says. “We’ll have to do something about that. Stay late studying to make up for it.”

Kim chuckles. “Seriously, though. I spent all day yesterday on the couch watching movies.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep,” Kim says. “Wall to wall Kurt Russell action.” 

“Right on,” Jimmy say, tapping the palm of his hand on the table like delivering a verdict. He studies Kim for a moment. “Should I ask about the midterms? I don’t wanna set off another ‘I only did way, way better than the rest of my class’ meltdown.”

“No meltdowns today,” Kim says. She stands and moves over to the coffee machine. Starts scooping coffee grounds into the top. 

“So you did well?” Jimmy asks. 

“Uh—I mean, we don’t actually get our results for a couple of weeks,” Kim replies as she pushes buttons on the machine. 

Jimmy glances at the contract law book on the table near him. And there beside the book, stuck to the top of Kim’s notepad, is the pink Post-it. On it is a little drawing of a ponytailed woman in a graduation cap and down, and beneath it the words, _The Honorable Kim Wexler_. 

Kim turns back to face him and notices the direction of his gaze. “Maybe not congratulations-you-graduated-two-years-early well, but I think I did okay, yeah.” She frowns. “What am I holding there, by the way?”

“A _gavel,_ ” Jimmy says. No duh. 

“Huh,” Kim says. “I thought it was a battleaxe.”

Jimmy glances at the drawing again. Fine, he can see it. “It can be a battleaxe if you want.”

“No, I like the gavel,” Kim says, pouring them each a cup of coffee. She carries them back to the table, setting Jimmy’s down in front of him. “The enormous, axe-sized gavel.”

“Well, you need a real big gavel if you’re gonna be on the Supreme Court,” Jimmy says, nodding his thanks. “It’s in the name, Kim.” 

Kim just smiles and rolls her eyes. 

“So how long until your next week from hell?” Jimmy asks, picking up his cup and blowing on the coffee to cool it, staring at Kim over the rim. 

“Not long enough,” Kim says. “A little over a month.” 

Jimmy grimaces. He sips his coffee and hears himself swallow extra loudly, then he sets his mug down on the table. He glances at the half open door to the breakroom—no sign of anyone arriving in the mailroom proper. “I, uh—” he begins, then he switches his gaze back to Kim, who’s watching him curiously. “I got an apartment. Chuck helped me with the deposit on a place a few weeks back, and I’m moving in this weekend.” Another look to the doorway, then back to Kim. “I just mean…well, I won’t be at the Ramada much longer. If you needed to…” He shrugs. “Call me again.” 

Understanding dawns on Kim’s face. “Jimmy,” she says softly. “I’m sorry I woke you up at two in the morning.”

Jimmy frowns. “You don’t need to apologize,” he says eventually. 

Kim settles back in her chair and studies him, folding her lips inwards. “No, I should. It was invasion.” She worries her lips again. “You didn’t tell me where you were staying so that I could bully the desk clerk and wake you up in the middle of the night.”

“Well, maybe not,” Jimmy says, giving her a small smile. “But I wasn’t looking for an apology.”

“Okay,” Kim says simply.

“What I was _going_ to say is that, once I get set up in the new apartment, maybe I can give you the number,” Jimmy says, glancing down at Kim’s hands on her cup of coffee. “Just in case, right?” He gives a light little laugh. 

Kim’s eyes twinkle. “Just in case,” she repeats. 

“I mean, yeah,” Jimmy says. He grins. “Hey, unless you think you’re not gonna need some patented soothing Jimmy McGill chit-chat in the middle of finals week, but, no offense, Kim—” he makes a show of studying her up and down “—I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Patented, huh?” Kim says, raising her eyebrows. 

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy drawls. 

“Patents have to be novel, Jimmy,” Kim says lightly. “You stole that whole watch-a-movie-with-me thing from _When Harry Met Sally_.” 

Jimmy shakes his head. “They watched _Casablanca_. That’s completely different.” 

Kim chuckles. She scribbles something on the bottom of her notepad then tears it off and hands it to him. “If my roommate answers, try to head her off quickly or she’ll chew your ear off for hours. Any willing victim. Or unwilling.” 

Jimmy tucks the paper into his front shirt pocket and pats it. “Thanks,” he says softly. 

“And I wouldn’t say no to _Casablanca_ ,” Kim says. She raises her eyebrows again. “You know…just in case.” 

The musical tone of the elevator rings out, and with it the sound of somebody arriving in the mailroom. Jimmy leans back in his chair, a ghost of a smile on his lips. The folded paper in his chest pocket sits like a firebrand over his heart. 

“Kim!” Burt says, as he walks into the breakroom. “You survived!” 

Kim smiles warmly, and her eyes flick to Jimmy’s for a moment. 

“I did,” she says. 

* * *

Jimmy packs up his stuff at the Ramada that Sunday. There’s not much to take, and his clothes still easily fit in the single suitcase he brought from Chicago. He buckles it shut and then walks around the hotel room, checking under the bed and in the nightstand. Nothing left. 

The bathroom cabinet, too, is empty. He closes it, and his reflection looks back at him from above the sink. His hair has grown out a little by now, and it hangs over his forehead boyishly. Somewhere in between Chuck’s neat parting and his own old Cicero look. Jimmy runs his fingers through it and studies himself. There’s still something about him that seems more dive-bar and back-alley than office mailroom. Something around the corners of his eyes, maybe. 

What does that guy want? he wonders, and he watches the way he frowns as if he’s watching a stranger do it.

Everybody wants something. And once you figure out what it is… 

Jimmy throws on a smile and does finger guns. “Stick ‘em,” he says, and then he drops his hands and walks away. 

* * *

Later that day, Jimmy sits at the end of his new bed as his little TV scans through the channels. It flickers from static to color, bursts of local news stations or commercials. Jimmy shifts, tapping his palms on the edge of the mattress and then turning to stare out his front door. It’s open, and from outside he can hear the sounds of people in the pool and the steady drone of traffic down the nearby road. 

The apartment complex is boxy and sterile-looking, like most things in Albuquerque to Jimmy’s eyes, and his rooms feel as half-finished as the architecture. He’s renting the place unfurnished, and even after the few things he ordered arrive, they sit in the square rooms like decorations in a dollhouse—somehow over-simplified, missing the fine, microscopic touches and details that make a place feel like a home. 

The TV finishes scanning. Jimmy searches through the stations for a while before settling on an episode of _Jeopardy!_ , where Alex Trebek looks out at him kindly. He spotted a Thai place on the bus ride over, maybe a five minute walk away, and he thinks in a while he could head down and pick up some takeout and a menu. 

Jimmy glances at his fridge. Stuck to the door with a novelty hot air balloon magnet is the scrap of paper with Kim’s number on it. 

He hasn’t used it yet. He imagines using it now, dialing the number with his new phone and saying, Hey, I missed talking to you today. I missed joking early in the morning, I missed getting a coffee from the cart outside and people-watching, and I missed smoking together in the parking garage. Because where, before her midterms, Jimmy would sometimes exchange only a couple of hellos with Kim, especially on days when she seemed busy studying, over the last week the two of them have filled their days with conversation, approaching each other during breaks or down time like a default state.

Like something you could set your watch by. 

And yet the conversations with Kim are the only things that really change for Jimmy each day. The mailroom job, the work itself, is slowly slipping into routine, and the weeks feel like they're sliding past faster and faster. Watching Alex awkwardly interview the three _Jeopardy!_ contestants, Jimmy realizes it’s hard for him to separate the days in his memory—what happened last Thursday, what happened last Wednesday? It’s a symptom of the kind of plodding, auto-pilot office life he had always revolted against, had always raged against the thought of. Same as it ever was, he thinks. Same as it ever was. 

He switches off _Jeopardy!_ and leans back, lying flat on his bed with his fingers laced behind his head.

Wednesday…Wednesday, more documents had come in for the Westerbrook divorce case, files and files of depositions conducted over the last couple of weeks. Depositions filled with terrible accusations and vitriol. And Jimmy has seen a picture of the couple’s kid by now, the young girl gripped tightly by her hand as her mother drags her into the passenger seat of a Ferrari. 

A child laughs nearby, the sound bubbling up from out by the pool. Jimmy pushes himself upright and slips on his shoes, then wanders over to pick his keys up off the table. _His_ keys. He jangles them in his hand as he steps out his door, pulling it closed and locking it. 

Through a gap between the square apartments, the Sandias rise proudly from the yellow New Mexico soil, burnt orange against the soft afternoon sky. 

* * *

Jimmy’s wheeling his mail cart through the second floor when he hears somebody call his name. He stops. Turns back and sees Howard and Chuck standing together outside Howard’s office. Howard beckons Jimmy over, so Jimmy tucks his mail cart into a corner and approaches them. 

“Jimmy!” Howard says, grinning broadly and clapping him on the shoulder. “Speak of the devil!” 

Jimmy raises his eyebrows and glances at Chuck, who inclines his head in greeting. 

“Listen, Chuck here says you’re the man to ask about this,” Howard says. Another quick look at Chuck’s face confirms that, whatever this means, it’s not what his brother had expected. “All the extra media scrutiny recently has really knocked morale. I’m sure you’ve noticed.” 

“Uh…” Jimmy says. It’s true that many of the associates have seemed a little withdrawn whenever he stops by their cubicles or offices recently—bar Carl Vernon, who’s been on cloud nine since getting the case. 

“I’m sorry, Jimmy, I’m not explaining myself clearly,” Howard says. “Chuck and I were just discussing ideas. Something fun to get the troops’ spirits up.” 

Chuck grimaces and nods his head to Jimmy. “I said that was always more _your_ department.”

Jimmy grins at him. “My department?”

“Well, you were always the entertainer in the household.” 

Something warm and electrified uncurls in Jimmy’s stomach. “You mean like the McGill Family Showcase?” 

Chuck closes his eyes for a long moment. “I’d forgotten…”

“What’s this?” Howard asks eagerly, eyes darting between them. 

“The McGill Family Showcase!” Jimmy says, and he claps his hands before him with a hollow noise then spreads them out wide. “Only the best evening of the year, the step-right-up highlight of your social calendar!” 

Howard looks at him, eyebrows climbing into his hairline. 

“We needed something to keep Jimmy amused at family gatherings. He was the only child there, usually,” Chuck says. “He’d put on little plays. Try on costumes and different voices. They were…charming.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jimmy says. “Just ‘charming’? I was _born_ to be on stage.” 

Chuck looks at him flatly, and Howard chuckles. “Well, not quite what I had in mind,” Howard says. “Though maybe I could share around the company’s box seats at the city theater. Good idea, Jimmy,” he adds, with another pat on Jimmy’s arm as he walks away. 

“The McGill Family Showcase…” Chuck mutters, watching Howard go. “Jesus, Jimmy, I’d forgotten all about that.” 

“Yeah, well, some of us’ll always remember your turn as the evil groundskeeper taken down by Shaggy and Scooby,” Jimmy says. “Whiskers made a great fake dog. Those white sheets were never the same, though.” 

“I believe I was channeling King Hamlet,” Chuck says. 

“Sure, if King Hamlet did a lot of screaming.”

Chuck turns to face him and studies him for a moment. “Look, I’ve been meaning to track you down, anyway, Jimmy,” he says, finally. “Rebecca’s mother is coming around for Easter dinner this Sunday. It’s just a little family thing.” 

Jimmy makes a little noise of curiosity, and waits. 

“You’re invited, too, of course,” Chuck says. “It’ll be quiet. You don’t need to bring anything.” 

“Sure, Chuck,” Jimmy says, and he smiles. 

“Sunday at six o’clock,” Chuck says. 

Jimmy nods. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

The dinner ends up getting moved to Saturday because of a change in Rebecca’s schedule, and so, at five minutes to six that Saturday evening, Jimmy stands outside Chuck’s door for the second time. He rings the bell. 

Rebecca answers. She looks beautiful, and she smiles widely at Jimmy in welcome. 

“Here,” Jimmy says, handing her a bottle of wine. “Chuck said not to bring anything, but I thought…” 

“No, this is perfect, Jimmy—ooh, a Syrah!” Rebecca says, peering at the label. “Looks good. Come in, come in, leave your shoes on.” 

Jimmy steps inside the house. He can hear quiet conversation from the dining room and classical music is playing from somewhere in the lounge. He follows Rebecca through to the voices—Chuck is seated at the table beside an old woman who has the same smile-lines around her eyes as Rebecca. 

“You must be James!” she says, creaking to her feet and holding out her arms.

Jimmy embraces her—she smells like lavender, but not soapy. Floral and fresh. 

“I’m Betty,” she says, pulling back but still holding Jimmy by the shoulders, studying him. “If Chuck still won’t call me ‘Mom’ I doubt I can get _you_ to, so Betty will have to do.” 

“Betty,” Jimmy repeats. “And it’s Jimmy, please.” 

“Oh, but James is so much more distinguished,” Betty says. She releases him and turns to the others. “Don’t you think so?”

Chuck gives an odd little laugh. 

“Wine, Jimmy?” Rebecca asks. “Beer? I think we have some…”

“No, wine sounds good,” Jimmy says, and he sits at the table next to Betty. There’s a plate of crudités in the middle of the table. He pops a carrot into his mouth and crunches. 

“So Rebecca tells me you work at HHM, too,” Betty says. 

Jimmy swallows. “Sort of. I’m in the mailroom.”

“Oh!” Betty says delightedly. “My Arnold started out at the post office. He loved it there.” 

Rebecca walks back into the room and hands Jimmy a glass of wine. She nods to Chuck, says, “Chicken’s in the oven,” and sits down opposite Jimmy. “We’re having a roast,” she says. “Nothing so fancy as last time, I’m afraid.” 

Jimmy shakes his head. “No, it sounds great,” he says, and he takes a sip of his wine. He’s no expert, but it tastes much more expensive than the bottle he brought. 

And, despite Rebecca’s deprecating words, soon incredible smells start to emerge from the kitchen, too, smells that remind Jimmy of Thanksgiving and family holidays. The red wine gives him a pleasant buzz, and he listens to Betty’s stories about her time in England and her chaotic book club at the local library with a genuine smile on his face. She’s a good storyteller, and energetic in a way that reminds him of his own mother, and he’s stupidly thankful for her. When Chuck brings to the table a bowl of roast vegetables and Rebecca carries out a glistening roast chicken, Jimmy feels more content than he has for some time—content in the way he remembers being as a child. Taken care of. 

The phone rings as Rebecca’s carving the chicken. 

“I’ll get it,” Chuck says, pushing back his chair and wandering into the neighboring lounge. Jimmy hears him answer, and then quietly chatter to whoever is on the other end of the line. 

“Wing, Jimmy? Leg?” Rebecca offers. 

“Uh, anything’s great,” Jimmy says, and Rebecca heaps shreds of white meat on his plate. “This all looks incredible.”

“Thank you,” Rebecca says. She finishes serving herself and Betty, then glances into the lounge for a moment before piling some chicken on Chuck’s plate, too, and sitting down. 

Betty passes around a bowl of green beans and Jimmy takes it, spooning some onto his plate and then handing it along to Rebecca.

“…I will. Yes, he’s here. Okay. You too. Bye,” Chuck says, wandering back into the dining room. He holds the phone out to Jimmy. “It’s Mom.” 

Jimmy stands and takes it from him. He steps out of the dining room and into the darkly-lit lounge, pressing the phone close to his ear. “Hi, Mom.” 

“Hello, honey.”

“How are you?” Jimmy asks softly. “You doing anything special?”

“Well, I went to the service this morning,” Ruth says. She doesn’t ask whether he went to church; she never does, anymore. “And I had an early dinner at The Pearl with some people from the bridge club.”

“That sounds nice,” Jimmy says. 

“It was,” Ruth says. She gives a little wistful sigh. “And now I’m having a lovely night watching Cary Grant woo uh…oh, what’s her name, Jimmy? With the little dog.”

“…Katharine Hepburn?” Jimmy suggests. 

“No, I mean, she has a little dog in those other movies.”

“Uh, I don't know... _The Thin Man?_ ”

“Maybe,” his mother says. “Tell me what happens in that.” 

Jimmy grins, and he leans against the wall, tipping his head back so his skull hits the wood. He tries to remember as much of the plot as he can and butchers it, his heart swelling as his mother chuckles on the other end of the crackly phone line. She’s always been his favorite audience. When he tells her a story, it feels as if she becomes a part of it, becomes an accomplice in the telling. 

“Yes, that’s her,” Ruth says, after he wraps it up a few minutes later. “Yes, Myrna Loy. She’s wonderful.”

Jimmy hums in agreement. “Yeah. So Cary Grant is wooing her in this?”

“Yes,” Ruth says. She sniffs. “Shirley Temple is in it, too.”

Jimmy stares up at Chuck’s ceiling, tracing the cornice with his gaze. “I don’t know, Mom. I don’t think I’ve seen that one.” 

“It’s a good one.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. They’re silent for a little while, and Jimmy sinks back against the wall, eyes upwards still. 

“So, are you having a nice night at Chuck’s?” Ruth finally asks. 

Jimmy nods and then says, “Yeah. It’s really great.”

“Good.”

He hears movement in the other room and shifts back up from the wall. “Mom, I should go, we were just sitting down to dinner.” 

“Of course,” Ruth says. She breathes out slowly. “Don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t,” Jimmy says quietly. “Love you.”

“I love you, too, honey,” Ruth says, and she says goodnight, and hangs up. 

Jimmy puts the handset down and closes his eyes for a moment, exhales once, and then walks back into the dining room. Chuck, Rebecca and Betty look up at him, their plates loaded with food and cutlery untouched. 

“Oh,” Jimmy says. “I’m sorry. You could have started.”

“Nonsense,” Betty says. “Now sit, sit.” 

Jimmy plops down beside her, and takes the bowl of roast vegetables Chuck’s holding out to him. He puts some on his plate quickly and then digs in, glancing around apologetically at the others as they finally do, too. He eats a mouthful of chicken and swallows it then says, “Seems like Mom’s doing real well.” 

Chuck lifts his eyes up to meet Jimmy’s. “Doing well?” he repeats. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, taking another bite of food and chewing. “Going out with friends, you know?” 

“Hmm,” Chuck says. “She should be careful.”

“Chuck,” Rebecca says warily. 

But Jimmy frowns. “Careful?”

There's a beat of silence, then Chuck adds, “She’s hard up for money.”

“What?” Jimmy sets down his fork. “Mom needs money?”

Chuck puts his own cutlery down, too. “You know that Dad’s life insurance barely covered the funeral, Jimmy. They had no nest egg.”

Jimmy didn’t know this. He takes a sip of wine. 

“It’s hard for her these days,” Chuck says. 

“What about Social Security?” Jimmy asks. 

Betty makes a little noise in her throat and pours some more gravy on her plate. 

“Let’s talk about something else,” Rebecca says. “Chuck, you’ve barely told us about your new case!”

“Yes, of course,” Chuck says, nodding at her. “Howard isn’t optimistic, and I already think we may need to set up a co-defense with—” 

“If Mom needs money, can’t you send her some?” Jimmy asks, pressing forward in his chair. “I mean—” he gestures around the house “—look at all this, you’ve got loads, right? If Mom’s struggling, why can’t you—”

“For God’s sake, Jimmy. I _do_ ,” Chuck says. 

“Oh,” Jimmy says. He shifts back from the table again. 

Chuck clears his throat. “She hasn’t been able to get her market stall set up since the operation. She relied a lot on that little income,” he says. “So, yes, I’ve been sending her money.” 

Jimmy feels something cold sink in his stomach. “The operation?”

“Yes, Jimmy. The operation. She had knee surgery.”

“What? When?”

“Maybe six months ago,” Chuck says curtly. “She’s healing well.”

Jimmy sinks back in his chair.

“Honestly, Jimmy,” Chuck says. His tone seems to drop deeper, and he stares at Jimmy with dark, intense eyes. “ _How_ you expected to stay informed about your family when you’ve been completely out of contact—off living like a—” 

“Chuck!” Rebecca says sharply. At Chuck’s resulting silence, she jerks her head to Betty, and Chuck looks mollified. 

Jimmy swallows thickly. He pushes a green bean around on his plate. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Rebecca says. “You didn’t know.”

Jimmy nods, a little jerkily. He takes another bite of his food. It tastes dry and cardboardy now, and it’s hard to get down. But he looks at Rebecca and smiles. “The roast is incredible,” he says. “What’s on the chicken?” 

“Garlic and thyme,” Rebecca says warmly. 

“It’s really good,” Jimmy says, and the others murmur in agreement. 

Betty makes the noise at the back of her throat again, and then she says, “Now, you’ll have heard this enough already, Rebecca, dear, but I have to tell these boys about the time your father and I got lost on the way to the Grand Canyon…” 

* * *

Later that evening, Jimmy lies on the top of his covers, his little TV playing _Growing Pains_ on mute. It’s the only light source in the room, and it casts tinted shadows that shift and fade with the picture. He thinks about his mother, alone in Cicero. He thinks about his mother in a hospital room just six months ago, and something sharp and painful presses at the back of his throat. 

He holds his phone in one hand, the cord draped across him and over the bed. He doesn’t need to check the number. He just punches it in and holds the phone to his ear, and the sound of the line connecting is like a life support machine, beeping and whirring.

Then: “…Hello?”

“Hey, Kim,” he says quietly. 

Kim gives a light laugh. “Wow, it’s not even ten o’clock, yet. Way too early to call—” and then her voice gets more distant “—No, I got it! Yeah, it’s for me—” then back to normal “—Sorry, my roommate. Hey, Jimmy.” 

“Hey,” he says again. 

He hears a door shut and the sound of Kim shifting. Sitting down, maybe. 

“I can call back later, if you’d rather,” Jimmy says lightly. 

“Nah, this’ll do,” Kim says. “So did you finally find a channel showing _Casablanca?_ ” 

“Not yet,” he says. “Billy Crystal makes it look so easy.” 

“Damn.”

He chuckles softly, and then they’re silent. Jimmy sighs. In the corner of his eye, the family moves about quietly on the TV, sitting down together around a coffee table. “I had dinner at Chuck’s tonight,” he says. 

There’s an intake of breath on the other end of the line, and then Kim says, “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Like an Easter thing, I guess. With his wife, and her mother, too.”

There’s another moment of silence before Kim says, “I’ve seen his wife at the holiday parties. She seems nice.”

“She is,” Jimmy says. “Her mother’s even nicer, she’s like…a cartoon. A cartoon grandma.”

Kim chuckles. “Sounds like a good time,” she says. There’s another rustling noise, as if she’s settling deeper into her chair. She inhales. “Did something happen?”

Jimmy closes his eyes. He presses the phone tighter again his ear, close enough he can hear the soft static of the open line. “I dunno,” he whispers. “Chuck told me something about Mom…” He swallows. “I just feel…” His words hang there, unfinished.

“Is your mom still around?” Kim asks eventually. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling. The lights of the television dance kaleidoscopically on the stucco. “Yeah, she’s back home in Cicero. She’s been different since Dad died, but this whole time I thought she was happy and doing well.” He sighs. “‘Cause she’s super tough, right? Doesn't let anything show. Not like Dad. Mom was always… she’s, what’s the word? Indomitable. She’s _indomitable._ ” He bites his lip, pinching the skin hard between his teeth. “But she was in the hospital, Kim. Surgery. Just a few months ago, while I was still there.”

A little noise comes down the line from Kim. 

“Why wouldn’t she tell me?” Jimmy watches the shapes in the lights on the stucco. “I get that Chuck’s the responsible one, the one who’ll always help, and he’s great at it. And he’s right to get angry, because it must be so tough on him, being the rock.” The TV show cuts to commercial, and, for a split second, the room is dark. Jimmy listens to the soft static of the phone line. Then blue lights rise up again, glimmering above him. “But she could’ve told me,” he whispers. 

Kim breathes. It takes her a long time to answer. “I don’t know, Jimmy. Parents—” she begins, and then he hears her swallow. “Parents…they’re not some great thing. They’re not indomitable.” There’s another gap, quiet and static-filled. “Sometimes they make mistakes. And it’s up to _you_ whether—” She doesn’t finish the thought. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, eventually. “Yeah. But…” He lets the word trail off into nothing. He thinks of his mother alone and closes his eyes. “I just miss her, I guess,” he says to the darkness of the back of his eyelids. 

“So call her,” Kim says gently in his ear. 

Jimmy laughs. “Yeah. Yeah, I will.” He smiles and opens his eyes again. “But what about you, how’s the weekend study session going? Full on, I hope.” 

“You know it,” Kim says. They’re quiet for a little, and then she says, “Hey, we got our midterm results back.” 

Jimmy sits upright. “Kim! What? How did you do?”

There’s another silence, but this time Jimmy can swear he feels the smile coming straight down the wire, because he’s already grinning himself by the time Kim says, “Best in the class! All A’s or A plusses across the board, even the stuff I was a bit worried about, and yeah, it wasn’t perfect, but for next time—” 

“Kim!” Jimmy cries, gesturing wildly even though she can’t see him, and then smiling when she falls silent. “Kim. Shut up about next time, seriously. Live in the moment. Bask in it.”

“I’m basking, I’m basking,” Kim says, words light with laughter. 

“More Kurt Russell?” Jimmy asks. 

“Okay, not quite that much basking.” 

Jimmy makes a dismissive noise with his lips. “Not this again. You gotta celebrate.” He stares at the colorful commercials on the television. Wilford Brimley gestures importantly about oats. A car drives smoothly down a country road. “We should do something tomorrow,” he says finally. “We should see a movie.” 

There’s a long silence from the other end of the line, but when Kim speaks he can hear the wistful tone in her voice. “I don’t know if I can, Jimmy.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says placatingly. 

“I’m just so busy.”

Jimmy nods. He waits, timing his moment, then says, “So what if we make it a law movie?”

Kim snorts, and the phone line fills with bubbly laughter.

Jimmy joins in, chuckling warmly and pressing a hand down on his chest. “Come on,” he says, after a little while. “Come on, Kim.”

Kim exhales. “All right, then,” she says. “A law movie. What did you have in mind?” 


	7. Downtown Albuquerque

Kim shows up at Jimmy’s apartment the next day with a cactus. She knocks on his screen door, silhouetted by the sun outside. He rolls off his bed and hops over to greet her, grinning abashedly. 

“It’s no palace,” Jimmy says, opening the door and beckoning her in. He glances around the stark apartment then turns back to her. “But hey, pretty great, right? You see the pool?” 

“I did,” Kim says, a small smile on her face. It’s the first time Jimmy’s seen her in jeans, and her hair is up in a loose bun. She holds out the cactus. “Happy housewarming.”

Jimmy takes the cactus from her. It’s a bulbous little thing, pale green and almost cartoonish. “Cute!” he says. “Thank you. Very Albuquerque.”

“I’ve gone native,” Kim says offhandedly, as she looks around the mostly empty apartment. “Jeez, Jimmy, you need to hang some stuff on these walls.”

Jimmy sets the cactus down in the exact center of his tiny table and then follows her gaze. She’s right, it _is_ pretty bleak. “Yeah,” he says. “What do you reckon, big poster of _Scarface_?” 

Kim snorts. She holds up her hands like she’s framing a picture. “I was thinking _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_. Just there.” 

Jimmy chuckles. “Maybe I’ll split the different and go with Belushi.” He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Wanna head out?”

Kim nods, and they wander out into the apartment complex. It’s mid-afternoon, and the sun is high and hot in the sky. Jimmy runs his fingers through his hair as he looks around for Kim’s car, and he’s extra glad that today he doesn’t have to walk the ten minutes to the bus stop and sweat through his shirt. He lets out a pained noise and wipes a hand down his face. 

“Welcome to New Mexico,” Kim says, raising her eyebrows. She leads the way her to car, unlocking the doors quickly so they can pile in. She turns on the engine and cranks up the air conditioning. 

Jimmy sighs in relief, pulling the front of his shirt out from his chest and fanning himself with it. “This as bad as it gets?”

“You crazy?” Kim asks. “This is nothing. Wait until July.”

Jimmy groans, and Kim laughs. She reverses out of the parking spot, shifts into gear and pulls away from the Beachcomber Apartments, the boxy buildings vanishing in the rearview. Jimmy settles back into his seat, smiling softly. 

“It doesn’t usually get this hot so soon,” Kim says. “It’ll cool down again tomorrow. And you’ll get used to it.”

“If you say so,” Jimmy says. He jiggles his knee then stops it, laying his palm down flat on the denim. He glances over at Kim as she stares calmly at the road, flicking on her right indicator and coasting onto the freeway. “You from somewhere cold, too?” he asks. 

Kim folds her lips inwards and seems to think for a minute, then says, “Yes. Sometimes. Or just different, I guess. A little town in Nebraska.”

Jimmy twists to face her in the passenger seat. “Little town, huh? I took you for a city girl.” 

She glances at him wryly. “Oh yeah?” 

“Yeah, you know,” Jimmy says, and he gestures at her, “you’re so on top of it. Efficient. Like you’re used to the hustle and bustle.”

Kim makes a little _hah!_ noise. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel, shifting lanes. 

They sit in comfortable silence for a while, marked only by the hum of the tires over the road and the patter of Kim’s fingers on the wheel. Patchy green trees drift past in the freeway median strip, little decorative accents that some poor chump must have to water. 

Jimmy looks over at Kim assessingly, and he can almost see the lines of legalese drifting behind her eyes. No moment wasted. “So what’s the name of the little town?” he asks, a small distracting prod. 

Kim folds her lips inwards again before answering. “Red Cloud,” she says, finally, darting another glance at him. “Nobody’s ever heard of it.” 

Jimmy smiles. “Nice name, though.” 

Kim shrugs her shoulders, fingers loose on the wheel. “It was a big railroad town. A long time ago, anyway. Not so much for the last, oh, hundred years. Willa Cather lived there.”

“Who?” Jimmy asks. 

“Willa Cather. She was a writer, wrote about the town. Had her name painted in big letters on the side of a building down Main Street.” Kim pauses, flicking on her turn signal and then peeling smoothly down an off ramp. She offers a strange, almost pained, smile, then says, “My mother had never heard of her. She always told me it was an old ad for diet pills.” 

Jimmy gives a little laugh. They slow down at a set of lights, and sit for the duration of the red in silence. Downtown Albuquerque unfolds ahead, open and sprawling. The buildings are so much shorter than what Jimmy’s used to, the roads so much wider. 

Then the light shifts to green and they drive on. “But hey, it’s only a few miles away from the world’s largest perfectly round barn,” Kim says. “So we got that going for us.” 

“Prairie town Kim Wexler,” Jimmy says, almost wistfully. “I never would have guessed!”

“Quite right,” Kim says, and she winks at him. She pulls into an open space in a half-filled parking lot, turns off her car, then twists to face him. “All right, I got us here. Fifth and Central, or near enough. You gonna tell me what movie we’re seeing, now?”

Jimmy grins at her. “Aw, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I think I left that back in Red Cloud,” Kim says, a little grimly. 

“It’ll be worth it, I promise, just a few more minutes,” Jimmy says. He thumbs the button on his watch and grimaces. “Or maybe more. Sorry, I didn’t realize how much quicker it is to get around here when you have a car.” He climbs out of the passenger seat and is hit with a rush of heat, and he reaches up to push his hair out of his eyes. He’s gonna need another haircut soon. “So when did you say I’d get used to this weather?” he asks as Kim locks her car.

“City boy like you?” she asks, then looks him up and down. “Maybe never.” 

They start walking down the main street, past shopfronts and cafés. It’s quiet—a kind of slow Sunday peacefulness, and the other pedestrians and cars move with a gentle patience. There’s a couple of taller buildings around, but for the most part the district feels like everywhere else in Albuquerque: smooth and flat and beige, the same as the desert.

“Don’t you think there’s just too much space here?” Jimmy asks as they cross a side street. He glances over at her.

Kim points down the wide, straight avenue to where the distant blue-grey Sandias arc along the horizon. “How can you have space when you have that?” she asks. 

Jimmy's eyes are drawn to the mountains for the rest of their walk.

It's not long before they arrive outside the movie theater. Jimmy grins at Kim and walks up to the booth. The man working there greets him, and Jimmy chats casually, studying the other upcoming showings, making a few mental notes. As he pays for their tickets, he glances back at Kim, who’s staring at a poster for _My Cousin Vinny_ with a knowing look on her face. Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei lean cockily in front of the judge’s bench.

“Cat’s out of the bag now, I guess,” Jimmy says as he walks back over “Here,” he says, handing over her ticket. “Congrats on surviving hell week.”

Kim raises her eyebrows. “Just on surviving?” 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He pretends to study the poster, as Kim had been doing. “Yeah, I reckon surviving is the most important part.”

Kim looks sideways at him and smiles, then she glances down at her ticket. “Jimmy, this doesn’t start for over an hour.”

Jimmy holds up his hands in surrender. “Don’t kill me. I’ll cover for you with Ron tomorrow and you can sneak an extra hour of study in the storeroom.” He drops his hands and then shrugs. “There’s a diner over the street. We can get a coffee and you can pretend not to crawl out of your skin.” 

She stares at him, eyebrows almost in her hairline. 

“On me?” he offers. 

“Okay,” Kim says. 

The diner is beautifully old school, a great hodgepodge of knick-knacks and souvenirs, and for the first time since arriving in the city Jimmy feels like he’s somewhere actually _old_. The whole place has that hundred-year-old lived-in vibe, like the air is still heavy with the grease of thousands of home fries and the cigarette smoke of the motorists who ate here fifty years ago. He and Kim pull up stools at the bar against the window, red-cushioned things, their leather brittle and patinated, and Jimmy sighs contentedly. A waitress smiles widely at them and pours them each a coffee, then takes their menus after they decline to order any food. 

Jimmy studies Kim. “So you wanna tell me about whatever law thing you’re thinking about?” he asks.

Kim shakes her head. “No, it’s okay.”

“You sure?” Jimmy shrugs lightly. “I like listening.”

“No—I mean, I wasn’t thinking about any ‘law thing’,” Kim says. 

Jimmy lays his hand over his heart in mock surprise. 

“Don’t give me that,” Kim says, rolling her eyes. “It’s been known to happen.”

“Well, you’ve basically gotta tell me now,” Jimmy says. “‘Cause I know you were thinking about something, you did the like—” he gestures to his face and does an exaggerated version of Kim’s furrowed brow and pinched lips “—the lip thing.”

“Oh really?” Kim says, lifting an eyebrow. 

“Oh really,” Jimmy repeats. “So spill.”

Kim takes a sip of her coffee and glances around, eyes lingering in places Jimmy can’t pinpoint, before she turns back to him. “There was a diner a bit like this back in Red Cloud. Somewhere for drivers to stop along the main road, not that anyone ever drove down it. But it smelled the same.” She glances at him openly.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says softly. “Yeah, it reminds me of home, too. Same stools, same posters on the walls, practically.” He glances down to where a balding old man in a brown coat is hunched over the bar, eggs and bacon and a newspaper laid out before him. “That exact old man. I think they mass produce him.”

Kim laughs quietly, hands wrapped around her mug. 

“Me and Marco would get root beer floats after school, sometimes. I loved it there,” Jimmy says wistfully. He stares at Kim and she meets his gaze; hers is still wide, exposed. “But maybe you didn’t like your diner all that much?” he asks.

Kim breaks his eye contact and frowns, staring out the window. The cinema across the street stands square but beautiful; it, too, looks old compared to the rest of the city, elaborate and grand, like somewhere old movie stars would attend premieres. 

“Maybe you didn’t like Red Cloud all that much?” Jimmy adds.

Kim lets out her breath, gaze still locked on the world outside the window. “It was a hard place to like,” she says, very quietly. She sits quietly for a minute, then turns back to face him and smiles. There’s a little frozen moment before she shifts and says, voice light, “So, do you want to hear about the thirty year drama of Lochner v. New York?” 

Jimmy returns her smile. “I’d like nothing more,” he says. He beckons toward himself. “Hit me with it.” 

* * *

Jimmy sits beside Kim in the darkened cinema, the theater resplendent and beautiful and dusty. 

He watches as, towering on the screen before him, Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei roll up to some rural Southern town in Pesci's rusty shitbox of a car, the engine screeching and spluttering. He watches Tomei hustle pool and Pesci con the judge with a fake name and a fake career. He watches Pesci spot a bluff a mile away, seamlessly reading people on the street and on the stand, and he watches the two of them flirt over law-talk, holding a fake trial about a leaky faucet that ends with them in bed. 

He watches Pesci in his leather jacket and outrageous second-hand suit stand in court ignorant of legal procedure, but dancing with magic words and logic until the jury matches his rhythm and he wins—wins using stunts and hominy grits and tire-treads.

And he listens as Kim laughs beside him through the whole thing. Jimmy thinks he can actually _feel_ her relaxing, and he glances at her as often as her can. 

Her eyes catch the light of the big screen like fireflies. 

Later, after the credits roll, they stand beside each other outside, the sky darkening with burnt orange and the deep blue of twilight. The air has chilled a little now, and a breeze caresses Jimmy’s bare forearms—soft and cool. It feels like summer nights back home and, emboldened, still hungover from the film, he asks Kim if she wants to get dinner and, to his surprise, she agrees. I know a place, she even says, eyes still twinkling as if they’ve brought the light of the theater out with them. 

They end up at a spot a few minutes down the road: the Dog House, lit with colorful neons that grow brighter with every passing moment of nightfall. Kim parks outside and the two of them perch, a hotdog each, beside each other on the trunk of her car, the lights glowing behind them as they eat quietly and stare into an empty playground across the street. 

Jimmy glances over at Kim. She’s sitting calmly. Her loose, blonde hair beneath the neon lights is like filament, like spun gold. He watches her until she turns to face him, and he smiles when he sees her eyes still have that bead of shining light, that trapped firefly. 

“So I promised you a law movie,” he says warmly. 

Kim chuckles. “You did,” she says. “Though I don’t know if I learned much that’s going to help with finals…”

Jimmy makes a _pshh!_ sound. “I bet you didn’t know that stuff about grits!”

“All right, all right, other than that. I’ve got the infamous legal hominy grits question on _lock_ now."

Jimmy chuckles. “Yeah, I guess he wasn’t exactly Clarence Darrow.” 

“I don’t know about that,” Kim says. “That whole Monkey Trial was a big publicity stunt. Basically a circus. Apes in the town streets.”

“No!” Jimmy says, popping his last bite of hotdog into his mouth and scrunching up his empty wrapper. 

Kim chuckles. “The big speeches, the showmanship…that’s Clarence Darrow right there. I think he would have been proud.” She finishes her own hotdog, chewing slowly, looking at the darkening playground. She’s so relaxed she seems almost like a different person, sat lazily beside him on the trunk of her car, miles away from the mailroom and the stacks of law books. 

“Thank you for coming with me,” Jimmy says quietly. 

Kim nudges his shoulder with hers. “It was nice. I needed this.” 

“Yeah, you did,” Jimmy says. “I did, too. After last night at Chuck's, I don’t…” He looks down to where his feet rest on the bumper, his sneakers worn and comfortable.

“It must be a lot of pressure,” Kim says, her voice gentle but edged with something unfamiliar. 

Jimmy glances back up at her. “What?” 

“A lot to live up to, I mean,” she says, staring out to where a few tiny lights mark out in the crests of the Sandias. “The great Charles McGill. I wouldn’t want to have to compete with that.”

“But I don’t want to compete with him,” Jimmy says, frowning. “I don’t wanna outshine him, or whatever.”

Kim shifts, and glances back at him. “No,” she says. “No, I guess you don’t.” 

“I just want…” Jimmy starts, and then he pauses. A couple of cars drive past, whirring. He sighs. “When I was a kid, any time Chuck would come home, or come visit, it was just…the _greatest_ day, Kim. The greatest! Like, I know little kids always think their big brothers are the smartest guys in the world, but Chuck actually _was_. He knew everything, even then. My whole life he’s known everything.” Jimmy grins, shifting back slightly so he’s leaning against the rear window of Kim’s car, staring up at the bruise-mottled sky. “So any time he came home I’d try to trick him, right? Like outsmart him, or catch him off guard. I dunno if I ever _really_ caught him, but he always did this thing, like a game, I guess, where he pretended not to be amused by it.” Jimmy lets out his breath in a long sigh. “But I knew he really was.”

Kim tilts back too, leaning against the glass beside him. 

“So that’s all I want,” Jimmy says. “I don’t need to live up to him. I just want to find that kid again, that kid who impressed him.” 

Kim nudges him with her shoulder again, then leaves her shoulder touching his, resting against it gently. It feels like a brand down his skin, somehow hot and cold at once, and Jimmy freezes, unconsciously holding his breath as if any movement might shatter Kim’s touch. 

He can feel her moving with her breath.

“The day we met, you asked why I wanted to be a lawyer,” she says, after a time. 

Jimmy tilts his head sideways and studies her profile. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t answer then. I know why I want to be a lawyer. The law’s the one place where things make sense,” Kim says, the neon-limned lines of her lips moving around the words. “Right and wrong, black and white. Legal, and illegal.” 

The colored lights catch the arc of her cheekbone, the curve of her nose. 

“It’s the only place where there’s clarity like that,” Kim continues, voice almost a whisper. “Black, white, legal, illegal. So simple.” Her chest rises and falls with a deep breath, up and down, and then she stills. “Except it’s not, of course.”

“No,” Jimmy murmurs, and he twists his head back to stare up at the sky. Stars are winking into being now, pale little specks against the deep blue. 

“But at least we try,” Kim says. “And I needed a place where I could try. After everything.” She falls silent, and Jimmy’s heart seems to press right up against his skin, and he wants to ask what ‘everything’ means—but he doesn’t—and he wants to ask what happened in Red Cloud—but he doesn’t. Because Kim didn’t ask what happened in Cicero. Because she didn’t force him to tell her.

So Jimmy shifts, lifting his arm and curling it around Kim, moving without thinking about it. He hears her sigh, and after a few moments she tucks herself into the side of him, nestling closer, her head resting on his shoulder. Wisps of blonde hair lift from her face and glow with neon light. 

He can feel her breathing, her chest rising and falling against the sensitive skin down his side, and he thinks about how impossible she is: how she probably had no Chuck of her own, no golden god to pluck her out of Red Cloud; how she probably had come to Albuquerque all by herself, all alone; and how she had found a way to bootstrap a new life behind the elephantine wall of the Sandias, a new life made of law books and coffee and clarity. 

And here she is, leaning into him like razors, like cut glass. 

He remembers telling his mother that everyone around him seemed to know exactly who they were and what they were doing. He wonders if he was wrong. He wonders if Kim, too, stood in front of her mirror the first day she arrived in Albuquerque and tried to understand the new person staring back.

Jimmy’s heart presses so tight against his skin he can feel it thudding, offbeat, and he knows that Kim can feel it, too. 


	8. The UNM Law Library

Over the next week, Jimmy finds himself thinking back to that night outside the Dog House more and more often. It’s strange to recall the loose-haired, jeans-wearing Kim when the one he meets at Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill sports increasingly darker bags beneath her eyes and moves with such a taut, frayed energy that his own muscles clench. Things are different from before midterms, because at least now she’s not completely withdrawing from Jimmy, but stress in Kim’s life strikes him as something a bit like the phases of the moon—and now, waxing, finals loom. 

So when Jimmy arrives in the breakroom on Friday morning and finds Kim in her usual spot with her back to the door, he’s worried but not surprised by the shift in her demeanour. She’s clicking a pen furiously, her shoulders wound so tight they might as well be humming, and he can almost hear her teeth grinding from the doorway. 

“Kim,” he says as he approaches, and he rests a hand on her shoulder. 

She starts, twisting back to face him. 

Jimmy leaves his hand where it is for a moment, and then he gives her a shoulder a squeeze and releases it. “Everything okay?” he asks. 

Kim just keeps clicking her pen and slowly shakes her head.

He pulls out a chair and turns it so it’s facing her and sits, palms on his knees. “Can I help?” he asks. “What can I do?”

“Nothing,” Kim replies lowly. She sighs. “Unless you have a copy of Hubert’s _Tort Law, Policies, and Practice_.” At Jimmy’s grimace, she drops her head into her hands and groans. Her voice comes out muffled from behind her fingers: “Fuck law students.” 

Jimmy chuckles at the sudden vitriol. “Not saying I don’t agree, but any particular reason?”

Kim lowers her hands and looks at him, bleary eyed. “Just hating myself for trying to skimp on course materials.” 

“What about the HHM library?” Jimmy asks. Although he wouldn’t have the first clue how to begin, he adds, “Want me to go check for that Hubert whatever?”

“No point, it’s not there,” Kim says. “And the college bookshop has run out, and I can’t find anybody to sell me their used one, and the only copy in the college library is overdue by a month now so I’m pretty sure that asshole has just decided to keep it!” She lets out a huff of breath. “I hope they _choke_ on it.”

“Damn,” Jimmy says. He taps his palms on his knees. Rubs them back and forth over the cheap blended fabric as the clicking of Kim’s pen resumes, syncopated and arrhythmic. Jimmy frowns. “I could ask if Chuck has a copy?”

Kim glances up at him. 

“His house is full of the moldy old things,” Jimmy says with a shrug. 

“Would you?”

“Yeah, ‘course!” Jimmy says, clapping his hands together. He pushes his chair back and stands, then pauses. “But write it down? I’ll never remember otherwise.” 

She scratches the name on the bottom of her legal pad. “Tell him I’ll return it by Monday. And that any edition is fine. I’ve made notes from other relevant books but they all constantly cite back to the Hubert and I just really don’t want to miss something.” With the last, Kim tears off the bottom of the notepad and hands it out to him. 

Jimmy takes the piece of paper from her, glances at it, then tucks it into his pocket. “I’ll go check now, he might already be in his office!” He meets her gaze and smiles, then glances down at her hands. “But maybe let go of that pen before you sprain a muscle,” he adds lightly. 

Kim uncurls her grip on her pen with visible effort, staring at her hand as if it were a stranger’s. 

“Hey, Kim?” Jimmy says, and he waits for her to look up before adding, “I’m on it.” He winks at her, then ducks out the door. 

Burt is arriving just as Jimmy gets to the line of elevators, so Jimmy rushes to catch his one before it leaves—brushing past the younger man and slipping an outstretched arm between the doors. They bounce back open and Jimmy hurries into the cabin. 

“Jimmy?” Burt asks from the lobby, bewildered.

“I’ll see ya soon, Burt!” Jimmy calls as the doors shut between them. As the floor display ticks upwards, he runs his hand over his mouth, pinching his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger.

Then the number finally shifts to a three, and the elevator doors open with their usual musical trill. The cubicles here are still mostly empty, and most of the lights are switched off. As Jimmy walks down the hallway, he nods hello to the few associates who are sitting, bleary-eyed, over their morning coffees. 

He shoves one hand into his pocket, crossing his fingers over each other. 

And, miraculously, the door to Chuck’s office is half open, a soft orange light spilling from within. 

Jimmy grins, striding over to it and rapping on it once with the back of his knuckles. “Chuck?” he calls out, and he starts to push the door inwards. “Mind if I—” 

Chuck looks up at him from a chair by the window. Beside him is another man, old and unfamiliar, who blinks at Jimmy inquiringly. “Jimmy?” Chuck prompts. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt—” Jimmy says.

“Is this the famous James?” the old man says. He rises to his feet and steps closer, leaning on a cane and studying Jimmy with twinkling eyes. 

Chuck stands now, too, like he’s operating on a slight delay. “Of course. This is my brother, Jimmy. Jimmy, this is Mr. Hamlin.”

“George, please,” George Hamlin says, and he closes the remaining difference between them and offers his hand. Jimmy shakes it; George’s grip is firm, papery. “You prefer to go by Jimmy?”

Jimmy nods once. 

“Jimmy it is, then,” George says. He has a jowly, distinguished look, his face aged with deep lines. He looks, Jimmy thinks, like William Holden in _Network_ —he has that kind of old-fashioned handsomeness, like you can see the sun on his skin, the years of cigarette smoke. His eyes are piercing, almost winking. They seem to shine with weathered idealism—and Jimmy remembers that this is the man who started a law firm all on his own, who was stuck in a tiny two-room office until the mythical Charles McGill came along and built the Hamlindigo-blue towers of HHM. 

“George has just returned from medical leave,” Chuck says solemnly. 

“And fitter than ever,” George Hamlin adds, tapping his cane on the ground. “I think I’ll get the other hip replaced next year, just for fun.”

Chuck gives a polite tinkle of laughter.

“Glad to hear you’re doing well,” Jimmy says, a bit stiffly. The next words come out just as awkwardly: “It’s nice to finally put a face to the name.”

“I might well say the same,” George says, inclining his head. “We’re delighted to have you. One of the shortest partner meetings in recent memory, I believe! In fact, I think Chuck here was the only one to voice any misgivings—always scrupulously fair, this one.” He pats Chuck on the elbow.

Chuck gives another small laugh at this, and then he frowns. “Did you want something, Jimmy?” 

“Oh, yeah!” Jimmy says, nodding. He withdraws the piece of paper from his pocket, unfolds it, then hands it over to Chuck. “Do you have this book?” 

Chuck’s brows pinch together as his eyes scan the paper. “ _Tort Law, Policies, and_ …Jimmy…” His voice trails off and his face visibly pales, then he looks up from the note. “Jimmy, what have you done?” 

“What?” Jimmy blinks. 

Chuck takes a step towards him, angling his body to exclude George Hamlin, to trap Jimmy in a one-on-one conversation. His voice, when it comes, is low and intense: “We made an agreement when I hired you, remember?”

It seems suddenly as if the walls of the office are growing, swelling outwards. Jimmy opens his mouth and, hopelessly, just repeats, “What?”

Chuck steps closer, moving in with the crushing walls. “Tell me why you need this book.”

“I don’t need it,” Jimmy says, and then at Chuck’s displeased expression he quickly clarifies, “I mean, _I_ don’t. Kim does.”

“Pardon?” Chuck says. 

“Kim needs it,” Jimmy repeats. 

Chuck exhales. “Ah,” he says, voice returning to his normal tenor. “Ah, of course. Your friend Kim.”

“Yeah. She’s studying for finals,” Jimmy adds.

Chuck scans the paper again as if seeing it anew, then looks back it Jimmy. “Can’t she check this out from the university library?”

“Somebody already has the only copy,” Jimmy says. “They won’t return it.”

“Ah,” Chuck says, again. 

“Hey, if you don’t have it, that’s fine,” Jimmy says, and he inches back towards the door. “I thought you might keep one hanging around.”

“Kim…Wexler, is this?” George says, and Chuck starts a little, as if he had forgotten the older man was there. George reaches out for the piece of paper, taking it gently from Chuck. He glances at it for a moment then returns to Jimmy. “I’m afraid I don’t have that exact title. Hubert was always a little…overwritten for my tastes. Chuck?”

Chuck shakes his head. “It’s possible I have an old edition tucked away in my attic, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking, Jimmy. Maybe Ms. Wexler can find another student to lend her their copy?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He creases the paper sharply and looks down at it, then shoves it deep into his pants pocket. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Thankfully I’m sure Ms. Wexler’s finals won’t live or die based on Hubert, the old fart,” George says, smiling softly. “But tell Kim to stop by my office some time, would you, Jimmy? I had a good feeling about that one when I picked her for the program, and so far she’s exceeded every expectation.” 

Jimmy smiles. “Sure, I’ll let her know,” he says. He nods to George Hamlin, who’s leaning heavily on his cane and watching Jimmy with bright, sharp eyes. And he murmurs a goodbye to Chuck, who still looks rattled, and Jimmy’s really going to need to ask Kim what the hell a fucking _tort_ is—because, whatever it is, it brought back into his brother’s eyes a severity he hadn’t seen since Cicero. 

Outside the office, he stares out the tall windows of the corridor for a minute, taking in the vast Albuquerque sky and breathing slowly, hand on his stomach. 

* * *

Everybody is just starting to get to work when Jimmy returns to the mailroom, and he catches Kim’s eye over the sea of binders and papers and solemnly shakes his head. He can see the way her shoulders slump from here. 

“Late, McGill?” Ron asks, wiping at his perpetually hay-fevered nose with his handkerchief. 

“Bathroom,” Jimmy says, and he makes a little pained expression. 

Ron scowls. 

“My stuff’s already in the breakroom,” Jimmy adds, gesturing to his locker. “Look, see? There’s my jacket.”

“All right, then,” Ron says, and he moves down to the morning’s mail and starts sorting through it with the methodical swiftness of a man who’s been doing the same job for forty years. The Elder Hamlin’s man, Henry had said of Ron, and now that Jimmy’s met George, he couldn’t imagine a stranger pairing. 

Jimmy wanders over to join Kim in the back corner, taking a handful of photocopied sheets from her and silently sorting them at her side, shuffling the papers with a gentle shifting noise, like sand. 

Kim accepts the collated pages when Jimmy hands them to her, and she slips them bunch by bunch into the jaws of a waiting stapler, slamming her palm down on the top of it with each bundle. _Slam. Slam. Slam._

“Hey,” Jimmy says, holding his hand out and hovering it above her own for a moment. He offers her a little smile and pulls his hand back. He tilts his head. “Whose face are you imagining?” 

“No one's face,” Kim says grimly. She slams her palm down again. “ _Everyone’s_ face.”

He grimaces.

_Slam._

“Ouch,” Jimmy whispers. He watches as she exhales slowly and runs a hand down her face, visibly exhausted. “I'm sorry about the book,” he murmurs, sliding the folded scrap with the title on it back to her, and then he stares down at the mess of documents before him.

He hears rather than sees Kim shrug. “Thanks for trying, anyway,” she says. 

“You’re welcome,” Jimmy says softly. He works for a little, and then stills. “Hey,” he says, turning to look at Kim again, “you’ll never believe who I met, though. George Hamlin!”

Kim raises her eyebrow. “He’s back?”

“Yeah, he was in Chuck’s office. He’s not what I expected. Oh, and hey—” he taps Kim on the arm with the back of his hand “—before I forget, he asked you to stop by and see him some time.”

“Really?” Kim asks. 

“Mhm,” Jimmy says. He catches Ron looking over at them and refocuses his attention on the documents before him. “Knew your name. Said you…what was it? Exceeded his expectations.” He shoots Kim a sly grin.

Kim looks down at her hands, smile ghosting her lips. “He really champions the college scholarship program here, so he gave me my first interview. We talked about, oh…baseball, of all things.”

“The crack of the bat,” Jimmy says dramatically. 

Kim gives a snorting little half laugh.

“The…smell of the turf,” he tries. 

“Yikes,” Kim says, flicking him a smile. “Stick with movie talk.”

Jimmy looks at her sideways. “That obvious, huh?” 

“Oh yeah,” Kim drawls. She staples another bundle of papers, pressing her palm down precisely. 

Jimmy studies her. Her brows are drawn together, the crease between them painfully deep, and her eyes are rimmed with the redness of late nights and early mornings. She holds out her hand for another set of documents, and he fumbles to quickly hand them to her. Kim murmurs a thanks, and Jimmy nods, and then returns to the piles before him. The two settle into a rhythm, moving fluidly together. 

“Actually,” Jimmy says after a few minutes, looking around the table then up at Kim, “Do you still have that paper with the book title?”

Kim reaches over and picks it up from beside the growing stack of completed documents. She hands it back over to him, eyebrows lifting in the unspoken question. 

“You’ll see,” Jimmy says, and he tucks the paper into the front pocket of his shirt then pats it once. Safe and sound. 

* * *

“Can I help you with anything?” the shop-owner, an old woman wearing a pair of glasses round her neck on a chain, asks.

“Uh, I’m good,” Jimmy says, looking back down at the rack of clothes before him. He rifles through, the hangers jangling on the metal. A shirt catches his eye and he peers at it: _Nirvana, Sliver_. Nah, not quite. “Just browsing,” Jimmy adds, returning his gaze to the shop-owner.

“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind,” the woman says, and she wanders back to her little desk near the back of the thrift store. 

Jimmy rifles through the shirts again, humming buoyantly to himself. It’s Saturday morning, and he feels light on his feet, ready for anything. He lingers over some vibrantly-patterned pieces, running his fingers down the silk, plucking out a sleeve here and there to peer closer at, before moving on. Finally, he arrives at a checkered shirt: red and short sleeved, and exactly the right amount of ugly. 

He hangs on to it as he keeps looking, sliding past corduroy jackets and black turtlenecks until—a bit ratty, slightly off white, with purple lettering, there it is. 

_Chevy Chase is… Fletch,_ the t-shirt proclaims. 

“Bingo,” Jimmy murmurs, and he carries the two items to the back of the store. 

The old woman look up at him over the top of her glasses. 

“How much for these?” he asks, laying the checkered shirt and the _Fletch_ tee over the counter. 

She frowns, pulling the paper tags out and examining them. “Ten for the button up, five for the t-shirt.”

Jimmy’s eyes fall on a rack of glasses to the left of the counter and he spins it, then lifts off a thick-rimmed pair and tries them on. Everything is a bit sharper than usual, but it’s not too headache-inducing. He slips them off and lays them on top of the shirts. “Twenty bucks for the lot?”

The woman agrees, and Jimmy hands over the cash then takes his purchases back to the changing room. 

He swaps out his own shirt for the _Fletch_ tee and layers over the checkered shirt, buttoning it up halfway and tucking it into his jeans. The sleeves of the _Fletch_ shirt stick out beneath the sleeves of the button up, and Jimmy fiddles with them for a little bit then leaves them as they are. He musses his bangs a little, then unfolds the glasses and puts them on. 

Perfect. 

* * *

The law library on the UNM campus is an unambitious kind of building, set against the rest of the law buildings and boasting the same square architectural style as most of the city. Jimmy pushes his glasses up his nose and steps through the doors, taking in the tall shelves crammed with the same kind of dully academic-looking texts that populate Chuck’s house. 

There’s a help desk near the entrance, and Jimmy approaches it. “Uh, hi,” he says, reaching the counter and tapping his palms on it alternately, one-two-three. “Hello, I’m hoping you can help me.”

“Yeah?” the guy behind the counter says dully. _Drew_ , his name-tag reads, pinned lopsidedly on his loose flannel shirt. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy repeats. He affects a troubled sigh and taps his hand on the counter again nervously. “Could you find a book for me? I’ve looked on the shelves, but…” 

“Name?” Drew prompts. 

Jimmy imagines howling to the moon. “Saul Goodman.”

Drew sighs. He raises his eyebrows. “Name of the _book_?”

“Oh, right,” Jimmy says, and he pulls the paper from his pocket. He reads out the title, and Drew types it into a glowing green field on his computer screen, then hits a key forcefully. 

“Arnold Hubert?” Drew asks, tossing his hair out of his eyes. 

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Jimmy says, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Old Hubert. But, like I said, it’s not on the shelf.”

Drew slides his chair down the length of the desk and rifles through a box of rectangular cards, flicking quickly through a couple and then shifting to a different box marked, _Overdue_. He pulls a card out and scans it, then slides back down to Jimmy. “It’s overdue,” he says blandly. “I can put your name on the wait list.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Jimmy says quickly. “It’ll be someone from my class. Finals, right?” He laughs and adjusts his glasses again. “We’re like a bunch of wolves. It’s not Barry, is it?” 

Drew looks at him expressionlessly. “I can’t tell you who checked out the book.” 

“No, of course not,” Jimmy says. “Only—I just need to quickly find a couple of…uh, facts and figures, you know? So if I knew who had it, I could swing by their dorm and look up that stuff. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with the whole wait list thing.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to put you on the wait list.”

“Right!” Jimmy says. “Right, exactly. I mean, how many schmucks are on there already?”

Drew closes his eyes briefly, then slides his chair to another part of the desk and rifles through a different box. “Hubert, _Tort Law?_ Three people.”

“So it’d be weeks before my turn, right?” Jimmy says. “I’ll be lying on a beach drinking margaritas by then.”

Drew shoots him the driest look yet.

“Okay, whatever, maybe not,” Jimmy says, holding up his palms. “But listen, this asshole is obviously just gonna return it after finals and lump the fine, right? You cool with that?” He gestures around them. “Whatever happened to freedom of information?” 

“I can’t control people’s stupidity,” Drew says. 

“Sure, that’s true,” Jimmy says. He breathes in, feeling a kind of crisp clarity, like a hit of oxygen, and he moves his hands before him, flowing. “And people are pretty damn dumb, I’ll give you that. Doing what the man says, day in, day out, following their stupid little rules.” He stops moving suddenly and clicks his fingers. “Hey! Just like you!”

Drew sneers at him. “What?”

“Yeah, with your cards over there. The suits in charge want you to sit behind this desk for what, five, six bucks an hour, and make sure the little guy can’t fight back against dumb idiots like this asshole who’s—” Jimmy leans closer over the desk “—who’s fuckin’ _monopolizing_ the one book we need to pass our finals and graduate the hell out of here.” Jimmy frowns, then delivers the closing shot in a low voice, tête-à-tête: “That’s not right, dude.” 

Drew stares at him for a moment, then groans and flicks his hair back from his eyes again. “Ugh, whatever, man. Here,” he says, and he passes over the card. 

Jimmy plucks it out of his hand and scans it quickly. There’s a long list, two columns, due dates and names—and there, at the bottom: _MAR. 27 ‘92, Brad Colhoun._ Jimmy grins, and he gestures to Drew for a pen, who hands one over peevishly. Jimmy scribbles Brad Colhoun’s name on the back of the torn notepaper from Kim, then tucks it back in his pocket and slides Drew back his pen. 

“Thanks,” Jimmy says, tapping the counter one last time and moving away. 

Drew just groans. 

“Oh, hey—” Jimmy pauses and turns back, waiting for Drew to look up before continuing: “Is there a payphone nearby?” 

* * *

Jimmy sighs. The pizza box in his hand is cold, and the bottom is starting to get a little damp, soggy from the grease. He balances it on his left palm and pushes his glasses back up his nose, then steps through the front door of the dorm block. There’s a common area immediately to the left, thankfully, and this one is nicely populated too—students watching TV and playing cards. 

“Hey, you guys seen Brad?” Jimmy calls, ducking in. 

One girl looks up vaguely from the Game Boy in her hands. “Who?”

“Brad,” Jimmy repeats. “Law school. Second year.”

The girl scrunches up her face.

“We’re studying together. I brought a, well…” Jimmy gestures with the pizza. “Pepperoni and mushrooms. Half olives. The olives are for me.”

“Okay,” the girl says, and she goes back to her Game Boy. 

Jimmy’s already dreading the long walk to the next block of dorms indicated on the campus map scrunched in his back pocket, but he tries one more time. “Brad Colhoun?”

“Oh, Colhoun?” one of the guys says. 

“Yeah!” Jimmy says. “He in his room?” 

“Man, don’t let him hear you call him Brad,” the guy says, and he frowns at Jimmy. “You’re studying with _him_?”

Jimmy affects a little grimace. “It’s uh…tutoring stuff,” he says, wondering if Brad’s the type of guy to do the tutoring or to be tutored. 

He finds out soon enough, when the Game Boy girl says, “Woof, good luck.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy says. “Anyway, hey, I haven’t been in this building before. How do I get to his room?”

“He’s on four,” the guy says. “Right next to the men’s.”

The girl chokes out a laugh. 

“Thanks!” Jimmy says, and he swings away, still balancing the pizza on his hand. He can’t find any elevators, so he takes the stairs, and he’s breathing heavily by the time he gets to the fourth floor. He wanders down the hallway—the carpet here looks a little worse for wear, but the place is pretty nice, overall, with big square windows at the end of the corridor that let in the bright New Mexico sunlight. 

The men’s bathroom has a door on either side of it. Jimmy stops at the first one and knocks a couple of times, but there’s no answer. He presses his ear to the wood and listens. No sound of anyone moving inside. He knocks again, then sighs, and walks past the men’s room and stops at the other door. He can hear soft music from behind this one, and he shifts the pizza again then knocks hard, twice. 

The door opens to reveal a skinny guy, who has floppy hair like Robert Sean Leonard in _Dead Poets Society_ and a scrunched, weaselish nose. “What?” he says. 

“Brad?” Jimmy asks. 

Brad’s face grows even more weaselly. He glances at the pizza box in Jimmy’s hand, then back to Jimmy. “You want something?” he says. 

“I sure do, Brad,” Jimmy says winningly. He steps through the open doorway and glances around the dorm room: it’s a bit unkempt, but not too messy. There’s a battered old acoustic guitar leaning against the wall and a pile of comic books on the desk with several empty soda cans perched atop them. 

“You from student services…?” Brad asks. 

“Nope!” Jimmy says, and he moves deeper into the room, studying the piles and books closely, then he sighs. “Listen, Brad, today’s your lucky day.”

“Huh?” Brad says, mouth curling. “I win a pizza or something?”

“What?” Jimmy says. 

Brad silently points to the pizza box in his hands. 

“Oh, no, this is for me,” Jimmy says, waving his free hand. “Today’s your lucky day because you’re about to make a _very good deal_.” 

Brad makes a little grunting noise, and then he gestures to the door. “I think you should leave. I didn’t say you could come in.”

“I guess not, I guess not,” Jimmy says, and he sits on the edge of Brad’s single bed and sets the pizza box down beside him. Hopefully some of the grease seeps onto the covers, he thinks, and he leans back and looks around the room casually, then snaps his gaze back to Brad. “Hubert. _Tort Law, Practices_ and something-or-rather. You know it?”

Brad’s mouth hangs open gormlessly. 

“It’s a book,” Jimmy says. “It’s a _library_ book.”

“You’re from the library?” Brad says, eyebrows drawing together. 

Jimmy closes his eyes and runs his hand over his face, then looks at Brad squarely. “I'm not from the library, no. All I'm here to find out is: how much do you want for it?” 

“What?”

“How much do you want for it?” Jimmy repeats, and he pulls his wallet from his pocket, cracking open the velcro. “I’ll buy it from you. Name your price.” 

Brad leans down and opens a drawer in his desk, shuffles through it for a moment, then pulls out a blue, clothbound book. It's truly enormous. Silver lettering pressed into the cloth gives Hubert’s name and the full title. “You want…this?”

“Yes,” Jimmy says crisply. 

Brad studies it carefully, and Jimmy wonders if he’s even cracked it open. “I don’t know,” he says. “I need to return it to the library.”

Jimmy makes a dismissive noise. “Oh, so suddenly after over a month you’re gonna care about that? Come on, Brad. How much?” He holds out his hands, wallet in his left. “Let’s make a deal!”

“I mean, I dunno…I’m gonna owe like almost a hundred bucks in lost item fines if I don’t take it back,” Brad says. 

Jimmy wishes he knew whether that was accurate or not. He should’ve asked Drew, the charmer. Something about Brad’s flickering gaze makes him suspect the number is exaggerated.

“So…I’ll take, uh, two hundred bucks?” Brad says, peering at Jimmy. He shifts in his chair, and his eyes dart to the window for a moment. 

“Hmm,” Jimmy says. He stands, counts out a few notes. “Tell you what, Brad, how about we make it an even hundred? That covers the fees. More than, I imagine,” he adds sardonically. “And considering how you already owe the library what, a buck or two a day for the last month, and that’s assuming you return it right now…” He holds out five twenties, stopping just shy of Brad’s reach. 

“Hundred and fifty?” Brad says, gaze flicking between Jimmy and the bills. 

Jimmy just waits. He stares at Brad for a while, then something on the desk catches his eye, something between all the comic books and legal pads and soda cans. Jimmy grins. “Hundred and twenty,” he says, “And you throw in _those_.”

* * *

Jimmy races to the gate of the apartment complex as another man is leaving, and he catches it before it closes, ducking through with a nod of thanks. He glances around—there’s an interior courtyard surrounded by blocky, almost cartoonish, beige buildings. The courtyard itself boasts a few benches and green trees, and concrete pathways that weave through the brown ground. 

Jimmy spots a staircase and makes his way up to the third level, the top of the complex. He wanders around the balcony—301, 302, 303…305. There it is. He pauses outside the door, and glances at the Hubert book in his free hand. After a pause, he lowers the pizza box to the floor and takes the book and tucks it beneath the front of his shirt, glancing down and smoothing out the fabric to make sure it’s as well hidden as it could ever be, for such a thick book. He picks up the pizza box again, shifting it between his hands. 

Then he rings the buzzer. 

After a moment that feels like an eternity, Kim opens the door. She’s dressed casually, her hair loose, but she still looks stressed, and her eyes are dark from lack of sleep. She blinks, looks at him up and down, then blinks again. “Jimmy?” she says. “What—” 

“Reverse directory,” Jimmy says. He grimaces. “Sorry.”

But Kim just starts laughing. She stares at his chest then looks back at his face and lets out another snort of laughter. “Wh—what’re _you_ supposed to be?” 

Jimmy glances down at himself: the tucked in checkered shirt, the half-revealed purple _Fletch_ logo on his chest. And he’s still wearing the thick-framed glasses, too. He reaches up and touches them, then grins at her with the silliness of it all. 

“Well, come on in, Clark Kent,” Kim says, pulling the door wider for him and stepping back so he can pass through. 

Kim’s apartment is tidy and much more artfully decorated than his own. The front door opens right into the kitchen area, and there’s actually a bowl of fruit set out on her counter. Down from the kitchen, open plan, is the living area, with a long couch opposite a decent television set and a cabinet of video tapes. At the far end of the room, glass doors open onto a little balcony. 

To the right of the main room are three doors—bedrooms and a bathroom, Jimmy guesses. 

“You brought…pizza?” Kim says, taking the box from him and then frowning. She feels the bottom, then she opens it. “You brought _cold_ pizza?” 

Jimmy takes off his glasses, and he blinks to clear his vision. 

Kim studies him and her lips twitch. “And what’s this under here?” she asks, leaning over and poking at the square shape of the book beneath his shirt. “You expecting me to punch you like Harry Houdini?” 

But Jimmy just grins. He shifts Kim’s hand away from his stomach and steps deeper into the apartment, then turns back to face her. “Hey, Kim?” he says. “When’s your birthday?” 

Kim frowns, then says, “…February 13th. You missed it.” 

“Nah, I’m just late,” Jimmy says. He pulls the tort law book out from the front of his shirt and hands it over to her. “Happy Birthday.” 

Kim freezes in place. If Jimmy couldn’t see her chest rising and falling, he might even think she’d stopped breathing. Her eyes are trained on the book, so he keeps holding it out, his hand moving a little—and how can Kim be so perfectly _still_ when he can’t even keep his hand steady— 

Then an enormous grin shatters over her face, like an ice sheet cracking, and she looks up at him with bright eyes and starts laughing, bubbling peals of sound that seem to echo through the room.

“What?” Jimmy asks, still holding the book, smiling a little but glancing around. He gives a soft chuckle. “Kim, _what?_ What’s so funny?” 

“Jimmy…” she says, beaming, and even with his eyes closed, even through a crackly handset, even down miles and miles of copper wire, Jimmy would be able to hear her smile in the way she says his name, the way it rounds off at the edges and rises, joyful, at the end. 

He grins. “So, you were right about that asshole who— _oomf!_ ” 

—because Kim has just leant up and pressed a hard kiss to the edge of his smile, and she’s gripping the back of his head tightly, and he can feel each of her fingers like fire through his hair—

And then just as quickly she lets go. She stares up at him with shining eyes. “Jimmy,” she says again. 

“Kim,” he says, grinning so hard it hurts. 

He realizes he’s still holding the book, and he offers it out again, and Kim takes it. She runs her palm over the cover for a moment, then cracks it open, flicking through the pages slowly and carefully. Her eyes dart over the words and she gives a little laugh. “Just as boring as I hoped!” she says. “This...I have to go get the rest of my notes.” She looks back up at him, grips his elbow once, then races down to the far door on the right. She calls out, voice muffled: “Come tell me how you found it! I can listen while I sort!” 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, staring after her. He reaches up and touches the edge of his mouth. There should be clichés for a time like this, he thinks dumbly. There should be metaphors. There should be words. But Jimmy can’t think of any words. 

“Bring the shitty cold pizza!” Kim calls some time later, maybe seconds or minutes or hours, and Jimmy shakes himself, picks up the box, and follows her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scams and flams with james morgan mcgill
> 
> i didn't expect to find myself writing the name "saul goodman" in this fic, and yet it's clearly his go to fake name since cicero days. so it had to be done


	9. Dead Week

“But why the costume?” Kim asks. She’s sitting sideways on her sofa, facing Jimmy, cross-legged. She takes a bite of pizza and chews it, scrunching up her face at him quizzically. “Why go full _Revenge of the Nerds?_ ”

Jimmy glances down at his clothes again. He’s just in the _Fletch_ tee-shirt now, but it’s still half-tucked into his jeans, and he chuckles. “Step one, get the mark to trust you,” he says, holding up a finger. “Nobody trusts an outsider. I’m pretending to be at college, so I needed to look like a nerd, right?” 

Kim gives him a stony look. 

“Exactly,” Jimmy says. “A college nerd just like you.” 

Kim kicks his knee with a socked foot. “Shut up, asshole.” 

“Hey, can’t argue with the results!” Jimmy says. 

Kim has the tort law book open on her lap, barely read for being too caught up in Jimmy’s story. It’s taken him a while to recount it, and for the first few minutes he felt like his body was lagging a few seconds behind his brain. 

The pizza box sits on the coffee table. There’s only two slices left—both from the (it turns out unnecessary) safety half without olives. 

“You’re the one out a hundred bucks, though,” Kim says, lifting a single eyebrow. “Seriously, Jimmy, let me—”

Jimmy makes a dismissive noise and waves his hand. “Pay me back when you’re a big time lawyer making bank.” He shrugs. “Honestly, Kim, this is the first steady paycheck I’ve ever had, I kinda feel like I’m rolling in it.”

Kim glances back down at the book in her lap. “I get that,” she says sincerely. “Still…” 

“Buy me a drink after your finals are done,” Jimmy says. “Hell, buy me two.”

“Deal,” Kim says, smiling. She shifts on the sofa, leaning sideways against the back of it. “I still don’t get how you knew the librarian would tell you who had the book.”

“Honestly, Kim, I thought it was gonna be Poindexter City in there,” Jimmy says. “Not some anti-authority slacker guy.”

Kim scoffs. “I could’ve told you that.” 

“Next time,” Jimmy says. He leans over and grabs the pizza box off the coffee table, and they take a slice each before he puts it back. 

Kim chews pensively. “So you played on his ideals?” 

“I guess,” Jimmy says. He frowns. “I dunno, I didn’t think about it like that. D’you reckon guys like Drew actually have ideals? I think he just likes to look down on everyone else.” He shrugs, takes a bite of pizza, and says, “So when I started to look down on _him_ …”

Kim makes a little thoughtful noise, her brow furrowing, and she stares at him intently—a studying kind of look that makes Jimmy feel almost uncomfortable. 

So he shifts against the sofa and says, brightly, “Anyway, you definitely gotta tell me what tort law is, now. Machines and stuff?” 

Kim chuckles lightly. “It’s just an area of civil law, really broad. It covers most civil suits other than contract stuff. So intentional torts are things like trespassing, or civil battery, and negligent torts are things like accidents, slip and falls—”

Jimmy almost chokes on his mouthful of pizza. 

“You okay?” Kim asks. 

He swallows the pizza painfully and says, “Well, that explains why Chuck looked at me like I’d run over his kitten.” 

“What?”

“Jesus,” Jimmy says, and he starts laughing. “Wow, I really went in there asking for a book on slip and fall law, huh?”

“Among many, many other things, yes,” Kim says, and she sets the book on the coffee table then straightens back up. “Wait, Jimmy, Chuck was pissed at you?”

“No, not pissed,” Jimmy says, waving a hand.

Kim peers at him, leaning back against the arm of the sofa. “Seems a bit like if you’d asked to borrow a criminal law textbook and he’d assumed you’d murdered a nun.”

Jimmy makes a face. “Well, maybe if I’d already wiped out the rest of the convent that’d be a fair guess.”

The analytical look on Kim’s face shifts now, and she smirks at him. “A whole convent, huh?”

Jimmy shakes his head. “The whole convent and maybe some visiting monks.” He lays his palms on his knees. Pats them and says, “I got good at taking the falls but I still fucked up these guys pretty bad over the years—well, maybe one time in particular. Chicago ice is cruel,” he adds. “Cruel but oh-so-profitable. Pick the right place, right time, and, boom, just like Ginger Rogers—” he claps once “—you’re in the money.” 

Kim raises her eyebrows. 

“Judge all you want, Kim,” he adds. “Back in the day, Slippin’ Jimmy was a force to be reckoned with.”

Eyes twinkling, Kim says, “Slippin’ Jimmy, huh?” 

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy says. 

“I mean,” she starts, laughing edging her voice, “if nothing else, it’s _descriptive_ …” 

Jimmy snorts. “All right, all right, shut up.” 

A rattling noise sounds from the front door: a key in the lock.

“Shit,” Kim says, groaning. “She said she wouldn’t be home til later.”

The door opens, and a woman—tall, with long red hair and round glasses—steps through, talking as if to herself, nose down in a paper bag that’s filled almost to bursting. “God, what a nightmare, you’ll never believe the lines at Whole Foods. Just ridiculous. And then when I finally get to the register the idiot says it’s cash only, even though I can clearly see the machine right there…” She huffs, putting her shopping down on the counter, and finally glancing over at them. She raises an eyebrow. “Hello, who’s this?” 

“A friend,” Kim says bluntly, folding her arms. 

“Hi,” Jimmy adds, leaning forward and giving a small wave. 

Kim’s roommate walks into the living room, surveying the space like a cop in a film, before turning her gaze back to Jimmy. “Andrea Delaney,” she says, laying a hand on her chest like a proclamation. 

Jimmy stifles a little smile. “James McGill,” he says, touching his own chest.

“McGill, eh?” Andrea says. She flashes a look to Kim. “Interesting.” 

Kim says nothing. 

“You’ve eaten already?” Andrea asks, eyeing the empty pizza box. “Dion’s? Saggio’s is a lot nicer and a lot closer. Five minute delivery.” 

“I picked it up,” Jimmy says winningly. “Sorry about that. Next time we’ll save you a slice.” 

Andrea looks between him and the box again. “That’s all right,” she says. 

“Well, it’s great to meet you, Andrea Delaney,” Jimmy says after a moment of silence. “Kim, you were halfway through that answer on Clark v. Holmes, right?” 

“Clark v. Holmes?” Kim asks. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, and he reaches for a random sheet of Kim’s notes. “Clark v. Holmes. What law did the prosecution use to overrule the objection of Judge Watson to the hung jury?” 

“Ah, right…” Kim says, and she starts talking confidently, looking upwards as if recalling stuff from the depths of her memory. Andrea listens for a moment, then glances around the room again and picks up the empty pizza box. She dumps it into the bin in the kitchen, then drifts off to her own room and closes the door. 

Jimmy mouths the word, _Wow!_ and flashes his eyes wide at Kim, who stops speaking. 

“You’re lucky she’s a biology student because that was total gibberish you just pitched me,” Kim says.

“She’s something all right,” Jimmy says, glancing over at Andrea’s closed door, then back to Kim. “And, whatever, you hit it out of the park. Honestly, halfway through your answer I was starting to think I’d come out with some of that McGill brother osmosis knowledge.”

“You wish,” Kim says. 

“Oh!” Jimmy says, sitting upright. “That reminds me, though—here, I snagged something else from our book-hogging friend Brad.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out two unopened decks of flash cards. “Check it! Look, and one of them’s on torts and everything.”

Kim makes an excited noise and leans forward, plucking them from his hands. “How’d you get these?” 

“Folded them into the whole sketchy book deal. Now I can quiz you for real,” Jimmy says. “Plus, this way you have something to keep, just in case you want to give the schmucks at the library their book back…” 

“You kidding? I’m keeping that forever,” Kim say. “Let Brad pay the cost for them to replace it.” 

Jimmy chuckles. “All right, great.”

Kim hands back the box of tort law flashcards silently. Jimmy runs his fingernail under the plastic and cracks it open, then shuffles the cards and clears his throat. He reads out the top card: “Blyth v. Birmingham Waterworks Co?” and then flips it, holding the information side up where he can see it, nodding as he matches what Kim says with the words on the card. 

After a short time, she falls silent. She taps her fingers over her mouth thoughtfully, and Jimmy watches the way the pink of her lips turns briefly white after each touch. 

He clears his throat and glances back at the card instead. “There’s one more thing you haven’t said,” he prompts. 

Kim’s brow pinches, her eyes flicking back and forth over invisible lines of text. “…doing something that a prudent and reasonable man would _not_ do,” she says, finally. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Yeah, that’s it.” 

He flips the card, and draws another. 

* * *

The next day, Jimmy sits on his new bed in his new apartment and stares at his phone. He imagines a line emerging from the handset, a thin silvery thread spinning off from his room and his street and then out of Albuquerque, crossing over the Sandias and shooting northeastward, over rivers and fields and Dust Bowl states, until finally arriving in Cicero, in his mother’s living room. 

He reaches out, hovering his hand above the phone, breathing shallowly. 

But he doesn’t pick it up. He turns away instead, flicking on his television. The evening news is running before-and-after footage of the California earthquake, up along the Lost Coast somewhere, footage that soon rolls into scenes of Clinton on the campaign trail, into Middle East peace talks in Washington D.C. and strikes in Germany. 

Jimmy lies back on his bed. Mike Wallace on _60 Minutes_ blends with Jessica Fletcher solving crimes, and then the Sunday Night Movie—some based-on-a-true-story thing about a boy killing his stepfather.

Jimmy falls asleep before it ends. 

* * *

Jimmy munches on an apple and leans back in his chair in the breakroom, watching Kim think. He’s holding up a flashcard, and her eyes flick to the writing on the front: _Bolton v. Stone_. He knows she knows it. He can remember he answering it yesterday. She stares down at the empty table before her, eyes skimming back and forth. 

The door opens behind him, and Jimmy calls out a hello without turning to see who it is. 

Kim smiles, head tilted down. “Okay, I got it,” she says, slowly, addressing the wood like it’s a jury, eyes still scanning over it. “That’s the likelihood of damage precedent. I remember it because a cricket ball is kind of like a stone, though of course Miss Stone was the one _hit_ by the cricket ball—” she looks up from the table and her eyes widen “—oh, hello, Mr. McGill.”

Jimmy frowns, and finally turns around. 

Chuck stands in the threshold, hands clasped before him. “Good morning, Jimmy,” he says, and he turns his gaze to Kim. “What a creative way to memorize case law.”

“Thanks,” Kim says crisply. 

“Stone hit by a stone. I’ll remember that,” Chuck says, flashing Kim a short smile. “Jimmy, do you have a moment?”

Kim starts to stand. 

“No, that’s all right. We’ll step out,” Chuck says, holding out a hand to stay Kim. 

Jimmy sets down his apple and slips the latest flashcard under the bottom of the stack on the table, shooting Kim a conspiratorial look. “No cheating,” he says, as he follows his brother out of the room. 

Chuck wanders through the mailroom and then stops, reaching out and touching a copy machine almost absentmindedly. 

“What’s up, Chuck?” Jimmy asks. He leans against one of the work tables and folds his arms. 

Chuck turns to look at him. “Today is George’s first official day back at work.”

“Oh yeah?” Jimmy says. 

“Yes,” Chuck says. “He managed quite well after stopping by on Friday, so we’ve decided it’s time.”

Jimmy gives a little smile, then, at Chuck’s continued silence, he raises his eyebrows. “Good stuff,” he says, to fill the quiet. 

“Yes,” Chuck says again. He turns back to the copy machine and taps it with the palm of his hand. “Now, you’re aware I went out on a limb hiring you.”

The temperature in the room seems to shift, and Jimmy folds his arms tighter against his chest. “Right,” he says. 

“I had to tell George about your past, of course,” Chuck says, and then he faces Jimmy again. A strange demeanor comes over him. Jimmy has nothing to compare it to except the way Chuck used to be with their father. He hasn’t seen it for a long time, since high school, really. “I told George all I needed to,” Chuck continues, “but I left out some of the more…unsavory elements.”

Jimmy swallows. He nods—then wonders why he’s nodding, and stops. 

Chuck frowns at him. “All this to say there are pieces of the story that George doesn’t know.”

This time, Chuck again seems to be waiting for Jimmy to say something, so Jimmy says, “Okay.”

“I’m sure you can guess which pieces,” Chuck says. “I’d rather not—well.” He sighs, and glances down and straightens one of his cuffs, then looks back up at Jimmy. “Do you understand?”

Jimmy tightens the fingers of his right hand on his bicep. “I think so,” he says. “Yeah.” 

“Good,” Chuck says. He looks around the mailroom lionishly, taking in the rows of copy machines and stacks of filing boxes—peering down his nose at the empty work tables in the middle of the space. He lets out a long breath. “Okay. Have a good day, Jimmy.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy says, after a beat. “Yeah—thanks, you too.”

Chucks nods to him once then moves away. Jimmy watches his brother press the elevator call button and wait, back straight and posture perfect. 

* * *

Jimmy discovers the reason for Chuck’s visit later that week. He’s making his now-familiar mail cart run, and he’s paused to chat to Ben about, tragically, the weather, when he hears somebody call his name. 

It’s George Hamlin, striding down the hallway with his cane, a warm smile on his face. “Jimmy McGill, just the man!” he says.

Jimmy smiles and says hello. 

“Do you have a minute?” George asks. He glances at the cubicle beside them. “Oh, good afternoon, Ben. How’d your boy do in his game on Tuesday?” 

“He did very well, Mr. Hamlin,” Ben says, eyes lighting up. 

“I’m glad to hear that,” George says, and then he holds his hand out to Jimmy. “How about it, Jimmy?”

“Uh,” Jimmy says, and he gestures to his half empty mail cart. 

“Leave that for a moment. It’ll keep,” George says, and he beckons Jimmy down the hallway, so Jimmy follows. They walk to George’s office, which Jimmy has previously only seen with the door closed. It’s a corner office, like the other partners’, but George’s somehow feels smaller—though Jimmy realizes that’s only because it’s filled with more things: more armchairs and bookshelves and framed pictures on the walls than his brother’s or Howard’s have. George sits in one of the armchairs, letting out a little sigh. “Ah, that’s better.” 

At George’s indication, Jimmy takes a seat beside him. 

George shifts so his cane is between his knees, and he rests both his hands on it. “So tell me honestly,” he says, eyebrows rising, “what do you make of this place?” 

Jimmy blinks. “HHM?”

George nods. “You haven’t had time to be corrupted yet. How do you think we’re doing?”

Jimmy glances around. “I like it,” he says.

“Do you?” George asks. 

“I mean, it’s different from anything I’m used to,” Jimmy says. He remembers Chuck’s visit earlier in the week, so he doesn’t elaborate, just shifts gears instead. “I think you have something to be really proud of. The people are great.”

George nods. “I’m delighted to hear that.” He looks around at his office—there are lots of pictures of himself on the walls, but always surrounded by other people. An empire. “Do you know why I got into the law?” he asks, after a moment. 

“…Because it’s mankind’s greatest invention?” Jimmy tries. 

“That sounds familiar,” George says, eyes crinkling. “But no—though I don’t disagree with Chuck on that. I got into the law because my father, bless him, spent every day of his life working on the assembly line at Ford. He made a lot of cars, and he liked his job, but when push came to shove, if my father hadn’t been there, there would have been another man with a stooped back and a hard-won smile to take his place.” He folds his fingers tightly over the top of his cane, then turns to meet Jimmy’s eyes. “Does that make any sense?” 

Jimmy frowns, and he unconsciously rubs his left knee, feeling the coarse cheap fabric of his slacks. 

“I suppose it doesn’t,” George says. “The lesson is: find a space in the world that only _you_ can fit. That’s what I hope I’ve done with this company. That’s what I hope I’ve done with my work, and what I hope my son will continue to do after I retire.” 

Jimmy glances at the wall behind George, where a framed picture of the two Hamlins hangs proudly. Howard’s wearing a graduation cap and gown, and his smile is such a brilliant white it reminds Jimmy of the sun. 

“But a company is no more than the people in it,” George continues. “I never wanted to be one of those bosses who employs a building of strangers. This week has been a lovely little catch up session for me. And I’ve been looking forward to speaking more with _you_ most of all.” 

Jimmy smiles politely. He remembers Chuck’s strange mood on Monday morning, remembers his brother’s careful words. He’s not sure what to do if George outright asks him about his past. 

But George doesn’t. Instead, he says, “Now, have you taken the tram up to the top of the Sandias yet?”

Jimmy shifts backwards on the armchair. “No,” he says. 

“Oh, you must. There’s nothing like getting a bird’s eye view of a new city, don’t you agree? It really helps you find your bearings,” George says. “And it’s hard to imagine a more magnificent landscape.”

Jimmy thinks of the mountains outside his apartment, rising sharp and shadowed in the dawn. “It’s very beautiful.”

There’s a knock, and George calls out. “Come in!”

The door swings inwards. Howard steps inside, eyebrows lifting when he sees Jimmy.

“Howard, of course. I’m sorry for keeping you waiting,” George says, and he rises to his feet. “Thank you for letting me chew your ear off for a few minutes, Jimmy. Tell me what you think of Albuquerque from above, yes?”

“Sure, I will,” Jimmy says, standing too. “Thanks for the tip.”

George’s eyes crinkle at the edges, and he gives Jimmy a little pat on his arm before striding after his son, his cane thudding on the floor. 

Jimmy’s left alone in the office, and he glances around one last time. He spots Chuck in a few of the photos, young and serious and lifted from Jimmy’s memories. Then he trails after the two Hamlin men, closing the door behind himself with a soft click. 

* * *

Kim slowly withdraws over the course of the week, closing herself off behind walls of books and yellow notepads. Jimmy feels a strange sense of foreboding when he says goodbye to her on Friday, and the feeling is proved all-too-justified when he returns to work the next Monday. He realizes that what he took earlier as a return to the peak of Kim’s stress levels was in fact only a harbinger, a warning front before a much bigger storm. 

Jimmy sits beside her in the breakroom one day, alternately reading his George Sanders autobiography and watching her work. She looks up every so often and smiles at him, and Jimmy smiles silently back. He thinks that maybe this is the one thing he _can_ do—just be here for Kim to smile with, whenever she needs it. He doesn’t mind. 

But, without her conversation, his days in the HHM mailroom slip back into grueling monotony. He feels like he’s sharing the same words with the same people over and over again, like a wheel caught in a rut. Beautiful day out, Henry will say, and Jimmy will nod, and return the sentiment. Have a nice night, see you tomorrow, good morning, busy one today, have a nice night…. 

Dead week, Burt tells him the college students call it, and yeah, Jimmy thinks: dead week. He spends most of a day somehow thinking it’s finally Friday, only to glance at the date on a document and realize it’s barely Tuesday afternoon. The air feels constantly dry, too—stagnant, like it’s trapped in the mailroom, gathering dust. Dead air. 

Forever floating at the corner of his mind are George’s words: find the space in the world that only you can fit. George had said them so casually, thrown them away like it was the most natural thing in the world, like it’s something he’s mentioned hundreds of times at dinner parties—and, Jimmy supposes, he probably has.

Jimmy thinks about how Chuck was never content with waiting on the world; how Chuck was always climbing; how, when Jimmy was a kid, Chuck would come home and tell their parents about his plans and his competition wins and his roadmap to success. Chuck, Jimmy thinks, knew how to carve that space for himself, knew how to make people proud. 

But Jimmy feels like he’s constantly shifting: growing beneath his skin any time he can make Kim laugh or convince just the right person of just the right thing; then shrinking again when the look flashes through Chuck’s eyes that makes Jimmy certain that, no matter what his mother said, Chuck isn’t— 

Jimmy shuts the door on that thought. Shuts it tight and forgets about it until it inevitably blows open again, latchless. 

Then somehow, without him even realizing it, it’s Sunday again, and Jimmy’s leaning back on his bed watching the evening news on mute. Astronauts try and fail to capture a satellite that’s flying too close to the Earth. 

He glances over at his phone. It’s been three weeks now since that dinner at Chuck’s, and he still hasn’t talked to to his mother. He can hear Kim’s words— _so call her_. Spoken so easily, and Jimmy thinks—well, hell, at least he can do _this_. So he reaches for the phone. Dials the number and presses the handset to his ear, counting the rings. 

He gets to eight before his mother answers. “Hi, Mom,” he says quietly. 

“Hello, honey,” she says, warmly. “Hang on a moment, let me shut off the TV.” There’s a shuffling noise and then silence. 

“Watching anything good?” Jimmy asks. 

“Not tonight,” Ruth says. 

Jimmy nods, settling back against his headboard. “So how’s Delilah?”

“Hmm—a bit off her food. I think they changed the recipe. Christopher came round and looked her over and suggested I try her on this new stuff. The cat on the can seems very happy, so I’m hopeful.”

Jimmy chuckles. “I’ve got my fingers crossed. Give her a scratch for me, okay?”

“I always do.”

Jimmy makes a little humming noise of agreement. The newsfeed shifts to aerial footage of an explosion in a coal mine in Canada, with solemn emergency workers standing around in the aftermath, and Jimmy shuts it off. He breathes out slowly. “So, how are you doing, Mom?”

“Oh, I’m good,” Ruth says. “I’m puttering around.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “Yeah. I mean…” He drops his voice, and the next comes out almost in a whisper. “I mean: Mom, are you doing okay?”

The silence on the other end of the phone line seems to shift, charged with a new energy. “I wondered when Chuck would tell you,” his mother says, finally. 

Jimmy feels a pain like a blade in his chest. It’s not that he had doubted Chuck’s story of his mother’s surgery, but…

“Jimmy?” Ruth prompts. 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Jimmy asks. There’s no response, so he adds. “I was right there, Mom. I could have helped looked after you. I could have visited, at least! Sat with you!” 

“Jimmy,” his mother says again. “You…you were really in no shape—”

“I would’ve found a way!”

“—and I know you don’t like being in hospitals anymore—” 

“That’s—for Christ’s sake, Mom, that’s not important—” 

“—so I thought it was for the best—”

Jimmy yanks the phone away from his head. He can hear the moment when his mother stops speaking, and he slowly draws the handset back up to his ear. 

“Jimmy?” his mom asks. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “I’m here.” 

He hears her sigh. There’s a shifting noise like she’s leaning back in her chair, or maybe resting her head. “I’m sorry, honey. It was just a little thing, in and out.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says warily. “Yeah, all right.”

“I was back on my feet in no time,” Ruth says softly. “And I had the ladies from the church checking in on me. Lily brought round a casserole.”

“That was nice of her,” Jimmy says. 

There’s silence on the other end of the line again. 

“Sorry,” Jimmy says, and he sighs. “I’m real glad you’re doing well, Mom.”

“I’m right as rain,” Ruth says, after a moment.

“Yeah. That’s good.” Jimmy stares at his free hand, turning it over under the light, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He brings it down onto the bed beside him with a soft thud. “Listen, Mom, I gotta go, but I’ll call you again soon, okay?”

“All right, Jimmy,” his mother says. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Jimmy says, and then he quickly moves the phone away and sets it down. He flops back on his bed and closes his eyes, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids. 

The blade in his chest digs deeper, like it’s being leaned on heavily, and Jimmy tries to breathe around it. 

He tries to breathe around it over the next week, too: finals week. Kim is almost completely absent from HHM, and Jimmy tries not to think of her sitting in exam rooms with dark-rimmed eyes and trembling hands. He calls a couple of times late at night, but the phone rings and rings, and then Andrea answers, and Jimmy hangs up without saying anything. 

Work in the mailroom is slow and dull, like molasses. Jimmy talks to as many of the associates as often as he can, trying to crack jokes and break the monotony, but there’s something about office life that seems to drift inevitably towards repetition—the same people and the same topics over and over again. He hears his mother’s voice down the phone line. _I thought it was for the best…you were really in no shape_ …and Jimmy finishes the last thought: no shape to help me, no shape to help yourself, no shape at all. 

The weight presses heavier on the blade between his ribs, and for the rest of the week, as he hole-punches paper, as he snaps the latch on a lever-arch file, as he hammers down on a stapler, he thinks: no shape, no shape, no shape… 

* * *

His phone rings on Friday night. 

Jimmy’s still awake, watching _TGIF_ and eating leftover Chinese. He shifts the takeout box off his lap and leans over, then raises the phone to his ear. 

“Jimmy!” Kim cries loudly, before he even has a chance to answer. 

Jimmy swallows his mouthful of chow mein. “…Kim?” 

There’s some background noise—laughter and glasses clinking and the sound of something hitting the receiver—then Kim says, “Come have a drink with me! A _law_ drink!”

“Uh, what?” Jimmy says, sitting up. “What—where are you?” 

The receiver is muffled again and then Kim says, “I don’t know the name—that Irish place by the university—”

Jimmy starts nodding. “Okay.”

“—where you told me about the sunroof—” 

Jimmy bursts out laughter. “Okay, yep, Kim, I got it!”

“We’re near the back—uh, I’ll find you, okay?” 

“Sure, Kim,” Jimmy says. “See you soon?” 

But Kim has already hung up.

Jimmy sets down the phone and laughs a little to himself, then he stands and desperately searches for some non-dirty, non-work clothes. He grabs his windbreaker on the way out the door, shrugging it on as he walks to the bus stop in the chill, night air. 

The streetlamps cast round yellow pools and Jimmy moves through them buoyantly. He feels like they’re fires, giving off warm air currents that lift him up from the hard cement and carry him smoothly across town. 

* * *

The bar is thronging with college students when Jimmy arrives. He worms his way inside and hops up onto his tiptoes, peering between the swarms of people for a familiar burst of blonde hair.

But Kim spots him first. Jimmy hears her call out his name and turns to see her waving from a booth down the far end. She slides out and approaches him, grinning. 

“Heya, Kim!” Jimmy says. “How’d you go on the exams?” 

Kim just grabs him by the elbow and tugs him to the side of the bar conspiratorially. Her hair’s up in a loose bun, flyaway threads falling around her face and her shining eyes. 

“You okay?” Jimmy asks. “What’s up?”

After a glance back to the booth, Kim whispers, “I hate them. You have to see. You have to see what they’re like.” She raises a finger to her lips, holding it there as she meets his gaze. 

Then she shifts her finger over to his own lips, pressing it down firmly for a moment then releasing it. Jimmy makes a little gasping noise at the back of his throat.

Kim gestures to him, and Jimmy follows her back to the booth. The booth is occupied by four young people, early twenties, he’d guess. He recognizes one of them as the Game-Boy-playing girl who gave him directions to Brad’s dorm room, and he smiles at her, but she doesn’t seem remember him. He makes a mental note to tell Kim this later—clearly, his nerd costume worked perfectly. 

“Budge up,” Kim says, sliding into the vacant space and then gesturing for the woman beside her to shift further along, making room. Kim settles in, then twists and smiles up at Jimmy, stretching her arm over the back of the booth.

He slots in beside her. “Hi there,” he says to the group.

Kim introduces the other college students: Game Boy Girl’s name turns out to be Steph, the other woman is Cara, and both of the guys are named Eric. “Eric H and Eric M,” Kim adds. She shifts her arm out from behind him, reaches for an enormous pitcher of beer and pours Jimmy a glass, then returns her arm to the top of the booth behind his shoulders. 

“Cheers,” Jimmy says, tilting his glass to the group. 

Everyone else has shots waiting, and they down them with Jimmy’s salutation, slamming the glasses down on the table. 

“Woof,” Kim says, sucking on her lime and then wiping her lips. 

Jimmy leans back into the upholstery, feeling the line of Kim’s arm along the top of his back. He twists his neck to look at her. “So, you didn’t tell me—how’d you do? Good?” He pauses. “Sure seems like you did good…” 

Kim shrugs. 

“Kim,” Jimmy says lowly. 

“Shut up,” Kim says, smiling at him. She takes a sip of her own beer and her eyes twinkle.

Something inside Jimmy breathes again for the first time in two weeks, the constant pressure on his chest relenting. He has another long drink, then sets down his glass, taking in the mess of empty shot glasses on the table, the condensation rings over the wood. 

He leans his head back, resting it on Kim’s arm, and she squeezes his shoulder in response. He can already feel the pleasant fuzz of the beer, and he smiles and closes his eyes for a brief moment—lingering. 

“So, Jimmy, you one of Wexler’s famous mailroom friends, then?” a voice asks. 

Jimmy opens his eyes. 

It’s Eric H—tall and lean and preppy in a salmon-colored polo. He quirks an eyebrow at them both. “Aw, come on, Kim, I say that with love,” he adds. He salutes her with his beer, and Kim eventually holds up her own glass. 

A bartender arrives with another tray of shots and starts setting them out on the table. The other Eric, Eric M, is short, but just as lean, with wire-rimmed glasses that look enormous on his face, and he whoops and tells the bartender to keep them coming. 

Jimmy licks salt off his hand and meets Kim’s gaze. Her lips twitch in a smile, and he lifts his shot glass, mirroring her movements so that they down theirs same time. The tequila is cheap, burning Jimmy’s throat, and he shakes his head to clear it. 

Beside him, Kim laughs, effervescent. 

“Yeah, Wexler, let loose!” Eric H cries. He jabs a finger at Jimmy. “This one really got our group through mock trials, so tonight she drinks for free.” He shoots a look at Kim. “No more turning us down!” 

“I’m drinking now, aren’t I?” Kim says. 

“More shots!” Eric M cries, and he clambers over the other Eric’s lap and out of the booth. 

Game Boy Girl, Steph, stares after him. “Glad _he’s_ having a good night,” she says dryly. 

“Yeah, ouch,” Eric H says, propping his arm back on the top of the booth. “You see him in there today? Sweating so much his glasses kept slipping off his nose. Dude’ll be lucky to make it next year.” 

“Total dead weight,” Steph says. 

“God, but how about the look on Halbert’s face when Wexler came out with Simpson v. Washington at the end, there, though?” Eric H says, shaking his head in disbelief. 

Kim’s knee brushes against Jimmy’s under the table, a flash of heat, and he darts a glance at her. He struggles to read any real expression in her eyes, and it reminds him of the first day he met her, when she’d seemed cold—standoffish. 

Eric M comes back with another tray of tequila shots and a bowl of nuts. “I took these from the bar,” he whispers dramatically, eyes wide and intense behind his glasses as he slides the bowl into the middle of the table. He slips back into the booth and passes them each a new shot, making himself laugh as he hands over each one in some parody of a gracious host. “For you, sir, Mr. Kim’s friend. For you, ma’am, our champion law nerd…” 

Jimmy downs his, the tequila burning his throat, and he gives a little spluttering cough, squeezing his eyes tight. He feels Kim’s hand rub his shoulder again, and, as he regains his breath, he turns to look at her. 

Her eyes have softened—warm blue like the midday sky. She smiles. “So, how have you been?” she asks. 

Jimmy smiles back. The tequila tingles on his lips. “Guess it’s been a while, huh?” he says. 

Kim makes a little face. “Did I miss much?”

“Nah,” Jimmy says, glancing away. He reaches for his beer and drains it slowly. It’s lukewarm and as dirt cheap as the tequila, and it almost reminds him of nights in Arno’s. He refills his glass from the same pitcher, watching the amber liquid froth and tip over itself. 

Across the table, Eric H and Steph are arguing about Ross Perot, making impassioned and heated points about campaign finance and other things that Jimmy can’t be bothered to follow. The other two students jump in every now and then, but Kim is completely silent—and he wonders for the first time about how tired she must be. He wonders how many hours of sleep she’s running on.

Another round of shots passes, and then, somehow, without Jimmy realizing it, the others have abandoned politics and moved on to their professors.

“Nah, come on, Turner was just a bastard. Took a dislike to me right away,” Eric H says. 

“You think it was personal?” Cara asks. 

“Had to be,” Eric H says, sniffing and brushing an invisible piece of lint from his salmon polo.

“God, did you see him patrolling the library during dead week?” Steph says. “I swear he was, like, writing down names.” 

“What a dick,” Eric M says. “He’s out to get us.” 

Jimmy sips his beer, feeling a nice, tipsy hum beneath his skin. He stares off at the people in the background of the bar, and he even thinks he spots Brad at one point—floppy haired and stony faced. After a while, he lets himself sink back into the warmth of Kim’s arm behind him. His mind is, blissfully, empty—no thoughts swirling and tumbling over each other, just a warm weight pressing comfortably along the tension in his neck, along his trapezius.

He tunes back into the conversation a little later. 

“So, you think you’ll move back home, then?” Cara is saying.

Eric H shrugs. “Dad didn’t promise anything about the company, but we’ll see. Clarkson’s retiring in a few years, too.” 

“‘Course, Kim’s the one who’s really got it sorted. That deal at HHM. Getting a real leg up over there,” Eric M says. “Just—” he makes a whistling noise “—straight to the top.”

Kim gives him a small smile that drops almost immediately. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back against the wooden booth. Loose hairs fall down over her forehead, drifting in an invisible breeze. 

Jimmy watches her breathe for a minute, then turns to the rest of the group. He nudges his knee closer to Kim’s under the table, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her sit up. “So, anyone wanna win twenty bucks?” he asks. 

Eric H pauses mid-rant. “Huh?”

Jimmy cracks open his wallet and pulls out a twenty, slapping it down on the table. “Twenty bucks. Easy peasy.” 

Eric H raises an eyebrow and gestures for him to keep speaking. 

“Like, all right, I work with paper so much in the mailroom, I’m kind of a magician with it,” Jimmy says, refilling his empty glass again, deliberately holding the pitcher of beer a bit unsteadily. “Amateur magician, anyway, whatever.” 

Eric H sneers at him. 

“‘Cause paper still remembers it’s wood, you know? So I’ve started to get kinda a sixth sense about it, sensing which way the grain used to run, doing all sorts of wild shit.” 

Kim’s watching him for real now, an almost invisible smile dancing on her face. 

Jimmy smiles back, then peers around her to where her purse is resting on their seat. “Mind if I?” he says, indicating it, and Kim passes it over. Jimmy spots the packet of cigarettes peeking out immediately, and he withdraws it. “Can I bum one?” he asks, holding it up. 

Kim chuckles. “Sure.” 

“I’ll cut you in when I win,” Jimmy stage-whispers. He taps a cigarette out of the packet, then shows it to the others. “Twenty bucks says I can bend this in half, end to end, without it snapping.”

Eric H makes a scoffing noise. 

“Go on then,” Eric M says, leaning back and folding his arms. “I’m in, sure. Twenty bucks.” 

Jimmy takes a long drink first, then he holds the cigarette up close to his eyes, turning it around and humming. “Ah!” he says, after a moment. “Okay, I’ve got it. Abracadabra.” He goes to fold the cigarette in half. 

It immediately snaps. 

“Shit,” Jimmy says. 

The others erupt into laughter, just as the bartender arrives with yet another round of shots. Eric M plucks Jimmy’s money off the table, then raises his shot of tequila. “To easy money!” he says, and the others cry out and slam back their shots. 

Jimmy sucks on his lime, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. 

Eric M is still holding up his shot, and he extends it to Jimmy. “A consolation prize,” he says.

So Jimmy takes it and downs it, too. He can feel the buzz of real drunkenness at the back of his mind, now, and he swallows tightly. “Hang on, hang on,” he says, holding up his hands. “No fair, I was distracted that time.”

“Distracted?” Eric H says. 

“Fifty,” Jimmy says, slamming his palm on the table. He looks around at everyone intently, then reaches for his wallet again and pulls out a fifty dollar bill. Beneath the table, he presses his knee tighter against Kim’s, and she presses hers back. “I bet _fifty_ ,” he repeats.

Eric M shrugs. “Your funeral, dude,” he says. 

“Lemme see the cash,” Jimmy says. He takes another long, performative drink of beer then licks his lips and stares at Eric M a bit unsteadily, exaggerating the real haze he’s feeling. “Anyone else?” he asks, as Eric M sets his money out on the table. 

“Jeez, Wexler, you got a real winner here,” Eric H says, and he pulls out a billfold and peels off a fifty dollar note. 

“Okay,” Jimmy says seriously. He slides another cigarette out of Kim’s pack, and holds it up to his eyes again. After a moment of pretending to study it, he frowns, then reaches for one of the fifty dollar bills on the table. He wraps the note tightly around the cigarette. Then he folds the whole roll neatly in half. End to end.

He hears Kim laugh beside him, and he wants to turn to look at her, but he keeps his gaze on the two Erics instead. Slowly, oh-so-slowly, he unfolds the bundle, then unrolls the fifty dollar bill until the intact cigarette is revealed in the middle. “Easy peasy,” Jimmy says. He picks up the cigarette and tucks it back into Kim’s pack, then returns everything to her purse. “Thanks, Kim.”

“Thank yourself, I’m down one smoke,” Kim says warmly. 

Jimmy chuckles, raking the cash off the table and basking in the indignant expressions on the Erics’ faces. “Hey guys, don’t feel bad. It’s that mailroom know-how.” He finishes his beer, slams down the empty glass, then slips out from beneath Kim’s arm and out of the booth. “Kim?” 

Kim grins and follows him, weaving through the throngs of college students. Jimmy stops by the bar, and he pulls the two fifties out of his pocket and hands them to the bartender. “Put this toward their tab,” he says, nodding to the booth. He feels Kim beside him and he turns to face her. He shrugs. 

She shrugs back, swaying a little unsteadily on her feet. 

Jimmy smiles at her. “Wanna get some shitty food and tell me about how much those guys suck?” he asks. 

Kim laughs, tipping her head forwards. Her eyelashes glitter like half moons. 

* * *

They stumble into Kim’s apartment a short time later, loaded with bags of food from a restaurant near the university that had seemed more like a fever dream: some late night hot-spot, enormous, like something out of a theme park about the Wild West, the walls filled with pictures of John Wayne smiling. 

Jimmy sets the food down on the coffee table then drops onto Kim’s sofa and groans. “Christ,” he says. “I almost didn’t make it.” He closes his eyes and wets his lips, feeling the tingle of the cheap tequila. He reaches up and touches them, wondering if they’re numb, running his tongue over his bottom lip. It doesn’t seem to get any wetter. He opens his eyes and looks over to the door. “Kim?”

Kim’s standing in the kitchen, staring at him. She shakes herself, and turns away, filling two glasses with water from the tap. She lingers by the sink for a moment then comes into the living room, handing him one of the glasses and sitting beside him on the sofa. 

Jimmy downs his water, then cracks open the closest Styrofoam container. A wave of beef and cheese and spice hits him, and he closes it again. “Wow, I dunno if I can actually eat any of this.” He feels like he’s swimming, and he turns to look at Kim. 

Kim, who’s still holding her glass of water, just watching him.

“What?” Jimmy asks, scrunching his face at her. 

“Thanks for tonight,” she says, and then she takes a slug of water and sets it down on the coffee table. When he doesn’t say anything, she stares at him again. “I mean it.”

Jimmy slips, soft-boned, down the sofa a little. He blinks up at Kim beside him and smiles. “Any time,” he says. He pats Kim’s knee. “And you did well this week, right?”

“I think so,” Kim says. 

Jimmy grins wider. “Knew it. Bet you did better than all those Erics and whoever-the-fucks.”

Kim laughs, leaning her head back. 

Jimmy stares up at her. “Seriously, Kim, how’d you get so smart?”

“Book learnin’,” Kim says dryly, glancing down at him. 

“Eugh,” Jimmy says. “If that’s what it takes, count me out.”

Kim frowns at him, brow furrowing. 

“What?”

She twists her body to face him, folding one of her legs beneath her. “You know you just outwitted a table of law students, right?”

“Right, Slippin’ Jimmy’s a bona fide genius,” Jimmy says, rolling his eyes. 

Kim shrugs. “Maybe he is.” 

Jimmy shakes his head. He feels himself sinking a little deeper into the sofa, and he stares down at his lap, where his hands rest loosely. His wrists are bare, now, sticking out of his shirtsleeves, pale and hairy. He keeps looking at them anyway, his stomach tight.

“You dumbass,” Kim says softly. “People have done much worse things.”

She reaches out a hand and lays it flat over his heart. 

Jimmy look down at her hand on him like it’s happening to a stranger.

But then he feels it, the heat of her palm through his skin and his shirt, and he turns back up to her, wide eyed. 

She’s still staring at her own hand where it’s touching him, and she moves her thumb a little against his chest as if she’s checking just to make sure she can do it. 

Then her eyes flick up to his. 

Kim leans down—or maybe he rises up first—and kisses him. Jimmy lets out an unconscious groan as he reaches up to grip the back of her head, running his tongue along her bottom lip, tasting agave. He opens his mouth—or maybe she opens hers first—and he tangles his fingers tighter in her hair, pulling her closer as she presses her tongue against his. 

Then she’s shifting above him, and Jimmy twists, wedging his back hard against the arm of the sofa. Kim nestles between his legs, her stomach pressing against him, and Jimmy makes a guttural noise, running his free hand down her back, over the curve of her spine. 

She trails her fingers up his chest and then back down, leaving wakes of goosebumps, and he licks into her mouth, his lips tingling, white-hot, and he doesn’t know if it’s the tequila, or Kim, or both. 

Then she pulls back, breathing heavily, looking down at him. She frames his face with her hands.

Gasping for breath, staring up at Kim from between her palms, Jimmy feels like she’s the only thing holding him together. Like he’s water in her hands. 

Kim presses her forehead to his, closing her eyes. “Not now,” she murmurs, breath ghosting on his lips. “You’re drunk—I mean, we’re both…” 

Jimmy watches as Kim’s eyes open again, watches as her pupils shrink a little in the light. “Okay,” he says. 

“Okay,” Kim repeats. Her hair is loose around her face like the rays of the sun.

Jimmy reaches up again unconsciously, twisting his fingers in the blonde strands. She presses her head into his hand, and he cradles her cheek, staring into her eyes. “Kim,” he whispers. 

She mouths his name but he doesn’t hear it. 

He stretches up to meet her and kisses her again, lips burning, breathing heavily in stolen seconds. “How about just this?” he murmurs, words escaping where they can.

Kim smiles around his mouth, and he feels it, and grins, too. “Okay,” she says, again, and she kisses him tightly, clinging to him, attached to him, stuck to him.

Jimmy laughs, bubbling with delight, and Kim rises, smiling down at him and laughing as well. He lifts his hand and touches her face like a blind man, the pads of his fingers pressing into her forehead and cheeks, and she bats him away playfully, then chases after his hand and grips it tight. 

“Come on,” she says, and she swings off the sofa, dragging him after her, past the bags of takeout growing cold on the coffee table, past the towers of law books and notepads, and into her bedroom. They fall down on her bed, side by side, facing each other. 

Jimmy reaches out and touches Kim’s mouth. She smiles beneath his fingertips, and he withdraws his hand, watching the white places turn pink again, and then he shifts forward, replacing his fingertips with his mouth. Kim kisses him back firmly, cupping his cheek. 

He runs his palm down her side, arcing along her shoulder and waist and hips, then back up, dancing over the sensitive skin of her waist, and he feels her sigh. So he curls his hand into the dip in her side and pulls her close with it, feeling her breasts press into his chest, and he hums, lips dancing and tingling with the vibrations. She laughs into his mouth and he swallows it, moving his lips against hers.

Kim moves her hand back from his cheek to grip the side of his head, her fingers laced around his ear, her pinky and ring finger curled tightly beneath his jaw. Jimmy loves the slight tension of it as he kisses her, like Kim’s an elastic band controlling the push and pull. 

He doesn’t know how much later it is that they slow down again, pulling away and facing each other on Kim’s pillow. It’s dark in her bedroom, but there’s a streetlamp shining through the blinds, throwing strips of yellow light across the room. One of them falls over Kim’s face, glittering in the corners of her eyes and shadowing the curve of her jaw. 

Jimmy smiles at her, reaching out and laying his hand on her cheek. Her skin is warm, and it feels like an anchor, like a safe harbor, because the rest of his body seems to drift, unmoored, floating on gentle currents. He closes his eyes and the feeling gets worse—unpleasant, even. “Oh God, I _am_ drunk,” he murmurs, opening his eyes again. 

“I know,” Kim says gently. She shifts, sitting up so her back is against the headboard, and she pulls his head into her lap. “C’mere.” 

Jimmy settles, head on her thighs, and stares up at her wordlessly.

Kim switches on her bedside lamp, and the light glows softly through the room like candlelight. She strokes his hair back from his forehead, threading her fingers between it, running her fingernails over his scalp. 

Jimmy hums happily. “Can I?” he asks, and then he reaches up and captures a golden lock, rubbing it between his fingers. He lets it go and it bounces back, so he captures it again. “How does it curl like that?”

“Magic,” Kim whispers. 

Jimmy laughs softly, pressing the silken threads of her hair between the pads of his fingers until his arm gets too heavy and he has to drop it. He closes his eyes, and Kim runs her hand over his forehead. “Kim,” he says, after a few minutes. He can feel the alcohol inside of him purring. He breathes out slowly. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

The hand keeps moving over his hair. “Nobody knows that,” Kim murmurs, after a little while. 

Jimmy opens his eyes again. He shakes his head, and the world spins for a moment. He says, “You do.” 

“No, I don’t.”

“ _You_ know,” Jimmy says, reaching up and poking his finger above her heart. “ _You_ know.”

Kim grabs his hand and holds it loosely, stroking her thumb along the back of it, tracing little circles above his wrist. After a long time, she says, “Jimmy, I don’t know a damn thing.” She leans down and kisses him, once, then straightens up again. 

Jimmy turns his head, facing her stomach, breathing her in. He can feel her moving a little, and her hand leaves his hair for a moment before returning, soft nails running over his scalp repeatedly. 

Then Kim starts talking. It takes his brain a moment to catch up, a moment to place the cadence, but then he realizes she’s reading something. He turns his head and looks upwards, scanning the cover of the book. 

“Willa Cather,” he says softly. “This is your Red Cloud?”

“Yes,” Kim says, closing the book smiling down at him. “Now, shh. Just listen. You’re in this one.” She opens the book again, and resumes reading, “ _Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West…_ ”

Jimmy closes his eyes and tucks his head into Kim’s lap, drifting in and out of sleep to the gentle rhythm of her hand in his hair. 

_“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made…”_

He thinks that Kim reads to him for a long time, though he’s not sure how much is a dream and how much is reality. All he remembers is the soft hum of her voice, and her hand in his hair, and the images conjured by her words: open fields and brilliant skies and sheet-iron landscapes.

_“The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out…here, I felt, what would be would be…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Italicised sections are from Willa Cather's My Ántonia


	10. Clines Corners Travel Center

Sunlight streams through the blinds the next morning, long white stripes that inch down the wall and over the carpet and toward the bed as Jimmy drifts between wakefulness and sleep. He can feel Kim beside him even though he’s not touching her, a weight and a warmth to his right. 

Jimmy shifts a little. He’s so comfortable it’s easy to ignore everything else, easy to ignore his terrible thirst and the ache in his stomach and instead slip back into drowsy slumber, into the scattered half-dreams that linger snugly in the blurred corners of his mind: he and Kim in the bar having a playful argument about a leaky faucet; or driving together at night; or just the feel of her moving above him, pressing down on his chest. 

Eventually, the sun catches him, flaring through a gap in the blinds. Jimmy turns and buries his head in the pillow. 

There’s a little huff of laughter from his right. Kim’s voice comes as something just above a whisper: “You must feel like shit.”

Jimmy twists, peeking over at her with a single bleary eye. 

She’s lying on her side, facing him. Her make-up is smudged, and her hair is loose and chaotic. With the way the sunlight’s hitting her and his sleep-blurred vision, it’s like she’s glowing, little filament strands of spun fire rising from her head. 

“I’ve been worse,” Jimmy croaks. He shifts properly onto his side and rubs his eyes, then smiles. 

Kim smiles back softly.

“How ‘bout you?” Jimmy asks. 

Kim gives another little patter of laughter. “I’m just trying not to think of all the Tex-Mex we left sitting out in the living room overnight.” 

Jimmy groans and presses his face back into the pillow. 

“You _did_ promise me you’d eat it all,” she says. “In between drunken imitations of John Wayne.”

“Oh God,” Jimmy says, voice muffled by the pillow. 

Kim’s voice comes a few moments later with a twang: “Get three coffins ready!”

Jimmy snorts into the fabric. “That’s Clint Eastwood.”

There’s silence, so he tilts his head to the side again. Kim’s regarding him seriously. “Yes,” she says. “Yes it is.” 

A thudding noise carries from the other side of Kim’s bedroom door—from the kitchen. Then the sound of a faucet running and the fridge door opening and closing. Cutlery clangs in drawers, sharp and piercing. 

Jimmy looks from the door to Kim. “I can’t remember your roommate’s name,” he whispers. 

“Eugh.” Kim makes a face. “Andrea. Please forget it again.” 

“Andrea,” Jimmy repeats seriously. 

Kim bats his shoulder. “Stop it,” she whispers. “She works at the café on Saturdays, anyway. We can wait her out.”

Jimmy nods. He stares at Kim, at the warmth in her eyes. It’s a wonder to him now that he ever found her hard to read, and he thinks she holds more expression in her irises alone than anyone else he knows does in their entire face. At the moment her eyes are shifting a little, flicking left to right between his pupils, brilliant skies flecked with paintbrush clouds. 

He reaches out and lays his hand on Kim’s cheek. He remembers doing the same thing last night. His safe harbor. 

He wonders what she can see in his own eyes. She doesn’t say anything. He can’t even hear her breathing. The only thing he can hear beneath their shared silence is the scrape of metal on china. A stool shifted back. Water in the sink. 

Then the sound of the front door opening and closing. 

Jimmy shifts forward and kisses Kim. She kisses back, her jaw moving slowly beneath his palm. His mouth is parched and dry and he’s desperate for cool water but he keeps going, and her fingers are on his forearm, curling tight, holding him fast. 

One of them draws back. Jimmy looks at his hand on Kim’s cheek, at the size of his fingers next to her features. He shifts his thumb a little, stroking the soft skin near the corner of her mouth. 

Her eyes tug down at the sides, and Jimmy desperately wonders what she’s feeling. Because of course it was silly to think he could see all of Kim through her eyes, could see all of Kim through anything, ever. He knows so little of her—just as she knows so little of him, so little of everything he left broken back in Cicero: ice and promises and knees and hearts. 

He moves his thumb again. Seeing her there in the palm of his hand makes a terrible part of him wonder if she was somehow put in Albuquerque just for him, if the universe in all its great wisdom conspired for her to be exactly here, ready, when he arrived. 

But he knows this isn’t being fair to Kim. If anything, the universe delivered _him_ to _her_. She’s the one choosing to bootstrap her way after her dream; he’s just sitting, in the one space left open to him in the world, waiting. 

He feels something clench in his stomach, like a fist tightening. It scares him to think that she might be the only thing holding him back from nothingness here, holding him back from losing himself beneath the vast and endless Albuquerque sky. 

He closes his eyes for a moment. 

When he opens them again, Kim’s expression has shifted. 

She leans forward and kisses him once more, bringing her own hand up to his face and running her thumb along the side of his lips after she pulls away. 

Jimmy feels the trace of her touch on his skin, gleaming. 

Kim tips her forehead against his and stares at him, her eyes flickering. “How about just this?” she asks. 

Jimmy breathes. “Okay,” he murmurs. 

She nods against him, stroking the side of his mouth with her thumb again. “Okay.”

* * *

Jimmy peers inside one of the takeout containers in the living room. “Some of this might not be too salmonella-y, you know,” he says. “Like, these burritos are just beans and cheese.”

“So eat them,” Kim calls from the kitchen. 

Jimmy swallows and closes the lid. “Point made.” He collects up all the containers and carries them over to the kitchen counter. Kim is staring at the steady drip of the coffeemaker, her arms loosely folded. He refills his glass at the sink, glancing sideways. 

Kim changed into pajamas overnight, but he’s still in yesterday’s clothes: jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. He feels mismatched, and his body aches, a low level thrum he tells himself is the shitty tequila more than anything else. He downs his water in long slow gulps that do nothing to really quench his thirst. 

Kim pours two mugs of coffee and hands him one, and he smiles his thanks. It’s warm against his palms.

“So, hey,” he says, following her as they wander back into the living room and settle on the couch. He realizes he’s unconsciously mirroring her movements, and he crosses one leg over the other just to sit differently. “How long ‘till you find out you came top of the class?”

Kim looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “The grades will be out in a week,” she says. 

Jimmy nods. He sips his coffee. It’s so hot it almost burns his tongue, but he sighs as he feels it rush through him. “Nice coffee,” he murmurs. 

“I used some of Andrea’s good stuff,” Kim says wryly. 

He raises his mug and cheerses the air, then sets it down on the coffee table. 

Kim is silent beside him, cradling her own coffee, staring straight ahead. 

“Does this mean you actually get a break?” Jimmy asks. “No classes, no tests?”

“I start summer school in a couple of weeks,” Kim says. “But until then…yeah.” She turns her head to face him and smiles. “Yeah.” 

“Wow,” Jimmy says, voice hushed. “A whole new Kim.” 

Kim makes a little humming noise of agreement. 

“Cause for celebration?” Jimmy asks tentatively. “A proper one, I mean?”

“Hell, Jimmy, I’m not leaving this four-foot square for the next two days,” Kim says, drawing a line around herself with her finger. “No interruptions, no obligations, no people, just me and the TV.”

Jimmy raises his eyebrows and tries to look as innocent as possible. 

Kim looks him up and down, frowning contemplatively. “You get a temporary visa.”

Jimmy laughs lightly. “Thanks.”

“Only if you agree to bring me enough food and water to live until Monday morning,” Kim adds. “And you have to pick a movie from the shelf over there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy says, pushing up off the sofa and moving over to the entertainment cabinet. He scans along the spines of the video tapes, smiling to himself at the selection. He realizes Kim’s movies are organized by date, not title, and he runs a finger approvingly along the ridges of the 1940’s.

“If you want to stay,” Kim adds, voice oddly hesitant. 

Jimmy turns back to face her and meets her eyes. 

As if she thinks he didn’t hear, Kim repeats, “I mean, only if you want to stay.”

“Of course I do,” he says quickly, and Kim nods. He looks at her for a moment longer, then Kim turns away, twisting back to pull a throw off the back of the sofa. She folds her legs up beneath her, snuggling under the patterned blanket, and Jimmy returns to the video collection. “You know,” he says, “if you’re serious about this zone of comfort thing, I might have to kill your roommate.” 

“Oh, she left a note. After work she’s up partying in Santa Fe for the weekend.” 

He hears the high-pitched whine and static buzz of the TV turning on. “Well, good,” he says, fingers lingering on a title, and he smiles and slips the VHS off the shelf. “I wasn’t much looking forward to prison.” 

Kim snorts. “You clearly think very highly of your cover-up abilities,” she says lightly. “But I guess you know firsthand—” She stops suddenly, falling strangely silent, and after a long moment Jimmy turns around. Kim’s staring at him, wide-eyed. “I’m sorry,” she says. 

“Kim, I don’t care if you joke about that,” Jimmy says, shrugging. “Seriously.”

“Okay,” she says, but she still looks off. She sighs. “I just feel shitty and hungover and I guess I’ve forgotten how to…” She trails off then waves a hand, marking a link between them. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He looks down at the video tape he’s holding, then back up to Kim, and he makes a little easy-going face. “Sitting and watching a movie sounds really nice right about now, though.”

Kim nods, and smiles at him. “Yes, it does.”

So Jimmy cracks open the box and slides the VHS into the player. _A Matter of Life and Death_ starts up at the end, with Kim Hunter grinning and a bandaged David Niven whispering, “We won.” Jimmy steps back from the TV and wanders over to the sofa, dropping down beside Kim. 

She finds the right remote and the two of them sit in silence while the tape rewinds. Jimmy curls his legs up beside him, and Kim hands him part of the blanket. He draws it over himself and then props his head up on his hand, watching the black screen and listening to the whir of the tape heads. He glances over at Kim and smiles, and she smiles back.

“Good choice,” she says. She looks back to the dark television in anticipation. “I love this one.”

* * *

There’s cake for Kim at work on Monday, produced proudly by Henry during their lunch break. 

“You didn’t have to,” Kim says, but she’s smiling. 

Henry waves a hand. “It’s tradition. I like to look after you guys.” He starts slicing into it, handing out thick wedges on paper plates. Jimmy accepts his and leans against the wall, eating his slice with his hands. 

“Thank you, everyone, for picking up my slack the last few weeks,” Kim says, holding up her plate of cake like a champagne flute. 

Jimmy raises his own plate, and he calls out with the others in congratulations. “To Kim!” he says, and the others echo him. He grins at her, then chats to Burt absentmindedly while Kim and Henry catch up. Jimmy watches her out of the corner of his eye, smiling and gesticulating. Totally relaxed.

She wanders over to him and Burt a few minutes later.

“Well done,” Burt says. “I bet you killed it.”

“Thank you, Burt,” Kim says, nodding to him. “You ready for classes in the fall?”

Burt grimaces. “I might give it another year, you know,” he says, and then after a beat of silence he drifts over to talk to Henry. 

“Easily spooked,” Kim says softly, looking after him. 

“Well, we can’t all be Kim Wexler,” Jimmy says. He pops his last bit of cake into his mouth and tosses his paper plate into the garbage, then leans back against the wall. He notices Kim watching him and gives her a secretive little smile. “Gotta say, the real world kinda sucks,” he says lowly. 

“Jimmy, we’ve only been at work for five hours,” Kim says, glancing over at the others. 

Jimmy shrugs lightly. “Yeah, and it _sucks.”_

Kim smiles, almost invisible. “Okay, maybe.” 

True to her word, Kim had barely left her sofa all weekend. They two of them had dozed away most of Saturday, burning through VHS tapes and local programming. Watching Kim sleep in the evening, his socked feet touching hers beneath the patterned blanket, Jimmy had tried to figure out how much of a deficit she’d been running on after the last few weeks, estimating a conservative three hours per night. He didn’t trust his math, but he knew it wasn’t a pretty number. So he sat as still as he could and tried not to wake her, just watched her breathe slowly, curled up against the back of the couch. 

Sometimes, though, it would be he who drifted off. He’d awaken to Kim’s hand on his knee and her brightly saying, “Jimmy, you’re missing the good part!” as Snake Plissken fought in a death-match; or to her handing him an enormous bowl of ice cream in the middle of the night, and then the two of them would sit, side by side, eating it in silence as John Candy drove the wrong way down a highway. 

“Ah, here you all are!” a voice says, and Jimmy comes back to the present to see George Hamlin striding into the breakroom, cane tapping. “And where is Ms. Wexler? Aha!” He moves up to Kim and holds out his hand, and Kim shakes it. “I’ve just heard the good news.”

“Well, I don’t know my resul—” 

Hamlin Senior makes a dismissive noise. “We won’t let that stop us, will we? Come, let me buy you lunch and assuage all your worries…” He steers Kim out of the room, and the two of them vanish through the breakroom doorway.

Jimmy stares after her. The tense little fist in his stomach squeezes harder. It’s a lot easier to ignore the feeling when Kim’s around, but left too long and his thoughts drift inevitably back to the same hollow places as they’ve done since he arrived in Albuquerque.

So he shakes himself and gets back to work. He stands in a corner of the mailroom, folding up and assembling large archive boxes from flat-pack as the others finish printing the latest round of discovery on the ongoing Westerbrook divorce case. It’s easy, mechanical work, and, when he’s done, Jimmy lines up the empty boxes along one of the workstations. He gathers the folders of discovery and files them away on autopilot, then heaps as many of the boxes as he can onto a dolly. 

“I got it,” Jimmy grunts to Henry, and he wheels the dolly between the workstations and to the elevators. When one arrives with a musical trill, he pushes the dolly into the cabin and rides the elevator up to the fourth floor. 

It’s busier than usual today, and Jimmy has to weave between hordes of frazzled-looking associates. He turns a corner in the hallway, grunting as he navigates a water cooler. 

Down the passage, through the open door to George Hamlin’s office, he sees a peek of a blonde ponytail, and he stops. Kim’s sitting, half-obscured with her back to the door, in a comfortable armchair opposite Hamlin Senior. 

Jimmy sets down the dolly gently, wiping the back of his hand on his brow. He can’t hear what George is saying, but it’s not hard to guess. The older man smiles and then moves his hands to assist some explanation or other, pausing every few moments to listen and nod. 

“Excuse me, Jimmy.”

Jimmy shifts aside just as Howard steps nimbly past the dolly, bound for his father’s office, too. Howard pauses in the threshold then enters, and Jimmy sees more of Kim now as she rises from her chair and shakes Howard’s hand. 

Jimmy tips back the dolly, but lingers to watch Howard chuckle lightly then pull up a chair beside the other two. 

The fist in his stomach clenches harder, white-knuckled beneath his heart. 

But he wheels the dolly the remainder of the distance to Vernon’s office and unloads the boxes for the man, breathless. 

* * *

Kim returns from her meeting and lunch with Hamlin Senior a little more withdrawn than she’d seemed before she left; but, instead of reaching out, Jimmy retreats a little, too. 

It’s not that he’s not happy for her, or proud of her, because he is, and he invites her for drinks that evening—it’s just that, as he watches Kim over the rim of his glass of golden beer, he wonders what it must be like to live with all these little markers of passed time: finals, then results, then summer school, then third year. Or, not even time, but progress. Movement. Rungs on a ladder, or just footsteps on the ground, showing that Kim is going somewhere. 

The days roll on, and Jimmy feels worse and worse—that kind of insidious, creeping discomfort that feels totally unearned and unjustified. He’s happy enough to get by, and the mailroom is busy enough to keep him distracted, and Kim is there enough to light up the dark corners…and yet. And yet the hollowness in his stomach continues. And then, of course, Jimmy feels bad about not feeling better, and so the spiral carries on, like water down a drain, and soon, before he knows it, it’s Friday, and he and Kim are sitting opposite each other at Flying Star, poking at plates of fries and not speaking. 

Kim pops a fry into her mouth and stares vaguely at a family sitting in a distant booth. Her brow is furrowed in thought, like it’s been for most of the last week. It seems a different kind of thought than the intense, case-law memorization he’s used to her harboring. This is unfamiliar, and he doesn’t quite know how to broach it.

She spots him studying her and smiles softly, then looks back down at her plate. 

“You okay?” Jimmy asks quietly.

“Hm?” 

Jimmy makes a little concerned face. “You okay?”

“Of course I am,” Kim says. She pops another fry into her mouth and crunches on it.

Jimmy nods. “Yeah,” he says, then he sighs. “So, memorial day weekend, huh? Any big plans?” 

Kim looks at him dryly. 

“Right,” he says. He swirls a fry around in the ketchup on his plate, then drops it. 

Kim’s gone back to watching the other patrons, and he wonders what she used to do with herself during these free weeks in Albuquerque, over the holidays or after the end of her first year. 

So he asks her, trying for offhanded: “What’d you even do before I showed up here, anyway?”

“Oh, you know,” Kim replies. “I went to class. I studied and nobody distracted me.”

Jimmy groans, and her face softens. “Come on,” he says. “Seriously. I mean, what about like now, between stuff?”

Kim shrugs, and pushes her plate forward, then glances over to the side again. “Just sat around and felt like I’d forgotten something,” she says, eventually. 

Jimmy offers a little sympathetic noise. He takes a sip of his soda, pinching the straw beneath his fingers, then sets his glass back down. 

“Like I'm missing something important,” Kim says thoughtfully, eyes still distant, but then she looks back to him. She folds her lips inwards and seems to be calculating something, and then she says, lightly, with a little shrug, like she’s just throwing it away: “Like I’m not working hard enough.” 

"What?" Jimmy frowns, and he leans a little closer to her. “Kim, you work harder than anyone else I’ve ever met,” he says. Even his dad, he realizes, who’d been in that store by seven a.m. every morning seven days as week for as long as he—well, for as long as he could, anyway. 

But Kim just shrugs again. 

“Seriously,” Jimmy says. He stares at her hand where it rests on the table. He doesn’t know what it’s like to work that hard, because he’s never bothered to try anything that’s truly difficult. Work for him is either something to be waited out, like photocopying sheets of paper, or it’s…effortless. As effortless as smiling or talking or breathing. 

As effortless as a problem he knows how to solve. He thinks about getting Kim that tort law book; he thinks about driving through Albuquerque in the streetlamp-striped sunlight and helping her study. And then he thinks that maybe it’s not just Kim herself who makes him feel better. 

So Jimmy meets her eyes, and says, “Wanna get out of here?” 

“Sure,” Kim says. “You done?”

But Jimmy shakes his head. “No, I mean, _really_ get out of here.”

Kim raises her eyebrows, eyes glimmering. 

“I’m serious,” Jimmy says. “We got three days ahead of us. We could just hop in your car and…”

“And?” Kim asks. 

Jimmy reaches over the table and holds her hand. “Kim?” he says, and he grins helplessly at her. “Let’s run away.” 

A smile crests Kim’s face like the sun over a wall. 

* * *

They ride the rays of that sunrise out the door of the restaurant and into the twilight of the parking lot. Kim’s car is parked close by, and Jimmy slides into the passenger seat, twisting to face Kim as she pulls her door closed and slips the keys in the ignition. 

She glances sideways at him and grins. 

Jimmy returns the smile. He’s breathing heavily, from the adrenaline, he thinks, or maybe just the race to the car. “Hey Kim?”

She raises her eyebrows again, waiting. 

“It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago,” he says, slowly, in between breaths. “We got a full tank of gas, a half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

Kim cocks her pointer finger forward coolly but doesn’t say the words, and Jimmy grins even harder.

But… “You for real?” he asks carefully. “You in on this? The two of us, fleeing into the night?” 

“I’m for real,” Kim says, and she turns the keys, and the car kicks into life. 

Kim pulls out of the space and wheels away from the parking lot, merging with the evening traffic, with the lines of glowing red brake lights that coast down the wide road. It seems busier than usual—the long weekend, Jimmy guesses—and everyone is driving with an easy leisure, like they’re heading for hills, too. 

Jimmy leans back in his seat, his mouth hurting from smiling. As they drift with the traffic, they pass students partying, spilling from restaurants and bars.

And then, on their left, the Aztec Motel, boxy and misshapen, like you can still see the hands that built it. Jimmy’s noticed it before, but tonight as they approach it in the dusk it catches his eye as if for the first time. The outside walls are hung with plates and art and sculptures like it’s a gallery all in itself, small and overlooked. And yet it’s unmissable, because beside the tiny building is a sign, a glowing beacon, three times taller and neon-lettered in red and blue, screaming the name: Aztec Motel. 

A reminder of the road this used to be. 

Jimmy feels the car slow down and knows that Kim is looking at it, too.

The traffic eases off a little, and they pass more old motels whose neons glow steadily brighter in the darkening evening: De Anza, and Zia, and Desert Sands, all unique and artful, and Jimmy feels like he’s in one of those old montages. Sinatra and Vegas lights. 

He turns to Kim and feels laughter bubbling up out of him, so he doesn’t stop it, and she glances sideways at him with the reflections of the passing neons in her eyes. He suddenly wants to say thank you, but he doesn’t know for what—for driving with him, for not asking where they’re going, for just being here? But then she breaks the eye contact, turning back to the road, and he pops open the glove-box instead. Kim has about a dozen cassettes, and a couple of them spill into his hands.

“Any requests?” he asks.

Kim shakes her head, smiling lightly. 

So he cracks open the first case he sees and slides the tape into the deck. It starts up: a soaring bassline and ragged guitars beneath a woman’s voice, reedy and emotional. Jimmy settles back into his seat and winds down his window, letting the soft night air whip across his skin. The mountains before them are shifting, moving closer, and he taps his foot in time to the beat, happy not to speak, happy just to listen and to feel the drone of the tires on the cement. 

Soon, they leave the city behind, flying over the busy headlights of the freeway and twisting up into the Sandias. Small towns of ancient houses squat in the foothills, almost invisible in the dusk, and Jimmy’s ears pop as Kim weaves higher and higher between the slumbering old settlements. The last of the sun is setting behind them, coloring the clouds burnt orange in the rear-view mirror and dark purple above the hills ahead. 

As they climb, the road narrows to one lane each way. Kim’s headlights pick out ragged shrubs and trees among the dirt-colored land, flashes of strange silhouettes along the embankments. Few cars pass them in the other direction, and, until they criss-cross the headlight-striped freeway again, it’s easy for Jimmy to imagine that they’ve left the world behind completely. The car hums beneath him, and the singer on the stereo is raw and beautiful, and he closes his eyes for a moment, letting the movement lull him, letting his body unwind. 

Jimmy expects them summit the hill with each corner, but as they round every bend he finds that the road continues impossibly upwards, still climbing as if into the clouds. Behind him, the shadowed amber clouds of the sunset slowly dim, darkening to reds and violets and then vanishing completely, until you’d never know there was anything behind them at all. 

Some time later, the music ends, and Jimmy flips over the tape. As the band starts up again, he drums his hand idly on his knee and glances over to Kim, who’s nodding her head to the beat and staring calmly into the curving road ahead. 

And then finally they reach the top of the mountains, cresting a rise in the road, and a vast flat countryside opens out beneath them. Jimmy can see the lights of the freeway bending downwards, the vanishing red brake lights of the cars, and here and there the glimmer of a distant living room window, lights in an expanse of darkness—boats on the sea. 

The woman on the album sings about something called a honeychain, and Jimmy turns up the volume until it’s rattling the speakers and the bass buzzes in his chest. He rests his forearm on the bottom of the window and the air rushes past, a downy wind over his skin. It smells, he thinks, like woodsmoke. Like woodsmoke and gasoline. 

They glide smoothly down the mountain on a gentle decline, passing through towns that can’t quite be called towns, and Kim slows a little as they go by ancient gas stations and souvenir shops and highway restaurants with no lights on. Caravan parks and rest stops. The two of them peer inside, brief encounters with these past places, with old soda machines and gas pumps. And everywhere along Route 66: the rundown motels, or just their signs—empty places where motels used to be. Arrows and suns and stars. 

The album ends, and Jimmy picks another, feeling for it blindly in the dark interior of the car. He turns the volume back down and lets the first track play, watching Kim, her face shadowed and dark until they pass an oncoming car and she’s made briefly vibrant. 

“I always wanted to do this,” Kim murmurs, and Jimmy wishes he could see her expression more clearly.

“Me too,” he says, instead. “Reckon we could make it all the way to the East Coast?” 

Kim gives a little laugh. After a moment, she says, “Why stop there?”

Jimmy holds his hand out the window, cupping the air and then releasing it, feeling the pressure of it on his skin. They’re down on the flat now, the land around them vast and empty, with no lights of civilization beyond the road, just unbroken darkness. Before them, pairs of headlights flicker into existence, so far away they’re almost invisible. 

The first billboard for Clines Corners shows up at least five miles before the junction itself. It’s an enormous, colorful thing, blinking into the cone of Kim’s headlights: _Clines Corners. World Famous Travel Center._

Then a mile or so later, another one: _Open 24/7 since 1934._

Then another, flashing past them: _Exit 3 Miles Ahead. Worth Stopping for Since 1934._

It’s followed by more and more, advertising drinks and t-shirts and souvenirs. Jimmy lets out a little chuckle as yet another billboard appears, and the silhouette of Kim’s head turns to face him briefly. 

“We do need gas,” Kim says mildly.

“And I could use a snack,” Jimmy adds.

He sees the curve of her profile nod. “That’s settled, then,” she says. 

A few minutes later, they finally see it: great neon letters in the dark, yellow and red like they’ve been branded on the sky. So Kim curves off the road and around, slowing down to a crawl. An enormous tower says _Travel Center_ in all-caps at the top, and on a flat building beside it is the name itself, given strange weight after so much anticipation: _Clines Corners._

Kim pulls into a parking space out front, and turns to Jimmy. 

“Bet you never thought I’d take you some place nice like this, huh?” Jimmy says, and Kim rolls her eyes and pops open her door. He chuckles and slides out of the car.

It’s a balmy night, not cold at all as they stand beside each other on the forecourt. Jimmy looks up at the enormous neon letters. They burn trails into his eyes, and when he finally turns back to Kim he can still see the ghosts of them, dancing.

He stares at her, and inhales, breathing the woodsmoked air.

They walk together to the entrance to the travel center. The doors open with a hiss, and the two of them step through into an enormous, windowless room. It’s part convenience store, part gift shop, all madness. The whole place has that plasticky familiar smell of every dollar store Jimmy has ever been inside. Fluorescent lights glare harshly above them, and he can hear one humming and guttering nearby.

The travel center is so crowded with shelves and items it’s hard to move, but he and Kim edge their way along an aisle. Jimmy picks up a ceramic horse and holds it up to her. “Do you need this?”

“Uh, Jimmy, I’d at least go for the palomino,” she says, pointing to a different horse on the shelf—a pale gold one, frozen midleap. 

Jimmy chuckles and puts the horse back down. They move deeper into the store, wrangling with rows of novelty mugs and plates. Kim stops by a shelf crammed with shot glasses, and they look through those for a few minutes, dozens and dozens of different designs and embellishments. They talk between themselves quietly, as if wary of disturbing the plush roadrunners and ceramic dogs that leer at them from nearby. 

A huge yellow New Mexico flag hangs from the ceiling, and Jimmy has to duck under it to continue. The store seems to carry on forever, or at least it’s hard to see the back of it through the mess of shelves and displays. Down one wall are stacks and stacks of t-shirts, and Jimmy wanders along past them, running his eye over the designs. The Zia sun symbol is everywhere, punctuated by Route 66 signs and American flags.

There's an old radio playing in this corner of the store, patriotic-tinged muzak that warbles a little on the high notes. Horns from some animal Jimmy can’t guess hang from the walls haphazardly. He stops to inspect a shelf of orange-tipped toy guns, then, inexplicably, racks of Halloween costumes. He and Kim have drifted apart, but he sees her head peek over some shelves and catches her eye.

He holds up a Frankenstein mask and shrugs.

Kim shakes her head solemnly. 

Jimmy smiles and hangs it back on the rack, then continues his loop. He finds himself back by the t-shirts and he lingers for a moment then grins, tucking a plastic-sealed one beneath his arm. The New Mexico flag blocks his path again and he ducks under it and wanders over to the other side of the store, past shelves of candy and snacks—and he sees, of all things in this nowhere travel center in the middle of empty field after empty field, bags of Jays potato chips. He laughs once to himself and grabs a couple. 

There’s a display of fireworks on a wall nearby, and Jimmy approaches it. Enormous boxes with colorful jagged text are crammed onto the shelves, the cardboard bent at the edges as if they’ve been stored here for a long time. He smiles at one called the ‘Runaway Train’ on which a cartoonish old prospector is blocking his ears before an exploding locomotive.

“You sure you’re old enough for those, champ?” Kim asks, stepping up beside him. 

“Maybe stick with some of the little ones, huh?” Jimmy says, pointing to a lower shelf. 

Kim pats him on the shoulder. “That’s the way.”

And he does grab a box, grinning cheekily at Kim. “How can I not?”

She laughs lightly, and they walk through the aisles of food together. Above a row of drink fridges is a banner. The lettering is old and faded and the font looks like it was chosen about twenty years ago. _Route 66: The Mother Road._

“Just like _The Grapes of Wrath_ , huh?” Jimmy says quietly, staring up at it. 

Kim makes a humming noise. “I think we’d have to be going in the opposite direction for that.”

Jimmy looks down at her. She’s holding a bulging plastic bag like she’s already bought something, but he can’t see through the opaque plastic. “Speaking of going…” he says, and then he meets her eyes again. He doesn’t want to ask the next question, doesn’t want to shatter whatever strange serenity they’ve settled in, but it slips out: “How far d'you wanna take this, Kim?”

Kim glances away, gaze skimming over the rows of Evian water in the fridge. 

And Jimmy starts preparing himself for whatever answer she’s going to give, nodding a little in advance. He adjusts his grip on the fireworks and chips. 

“Well, we’re running away, right?” Kim says finally, staring at the fridge thoughtfully. “We have to go somewhere…” A line appears in the middle of her forehead and then vanishes a few moments later, and she turns to him and grins. “I think I know where.” 

* * *

Kim leaves to gas up her car while Jimmy pays for his various purchases. He steps back outside, and the night air feels even warmer than earlier after the air-conditioned interior of the store. He spots Kim standing beside the gas pump and wanders over slowly, stretching out his shoulders before returning to the passenger seat. 

A minute or two later, Kim hops in beside him and pulls her door closed with a snap. She glances down sideways at the bag between his feet. “So what did you get, then?” she asks. 

“The fireworks, obviously,” Jimmy says, flicking his eyes to her and smiling. “Got some Jays chips, very Chicago, you’re gonna love them, plus some other snacks, and a shirt, and then on my way out the door I found—” he pulls out a strapback hat with a picture of a sombrero stitched on the front and wedges it on his head “—this rad hat!” 

Kim nods slowly. “That is very rad,” she says. 

“It’s a hat on a hat!” Jimmy says, holding out his hands winningly. 

“I can see that.”

Jimmy scoffs and takes the hat off again. “Fine, what about you, what’d you get?”

“Just some shot glasses,” Kim says, and she tucks her bag behind her seat. 

“All right, woman of mystery, I get it,” Jimmy says, rummaging beneath his bags of chips for the sealed t-shirt. He tears open the plastic wrapper and shakes the shirt out, then pulls his current shirt over his head and replaces it with his new one. It’s bright turquoise, a little too big for him, and on the front is a road sign for Albuquerque with a thoughtful Bugs Bunny standing beside it. Jimmy grins at Kim. “So, what d’you think?” 

Kim looks back up at his face. “Very cute.”

He pops the hat back on, too, and raises his eyebrows at her expectantly. 

Kim snorts. “Well, if you need a new disguise to buy some dynamite from Speedy Gonzales, you’re all set.” 

“I just want to be prepared for anything,” Jimmy says lightly. He buckles his seat-belt and then grins at her. “Speaking of—still not gonna tell me where we’re going?” 

“Nope,” Kim says, popping the ‘p’. 

“All right, I love it,” Jimmy says. He cocks his finger forward. “Hit it.”

Kim gives a light little laugh, and she pulls out of the gas station. Jimmy rifles for a new cassette tape and pops one into the player, then looks back up to see that, instead of getting back onto Route 66, they’re driving over it, heading south. 

“Oh, I know where we’re headed now,” he says, as they glide down off the overpass. “You’re kidnapping me and taking me to Mexico.”

“Damn,” Kim says. “Can’t get anything by these McGills.” 

Chuckling, Jimmy pops open his bag of Jays chips. He looks inside and shakes them around. “How old d’you reckon these are?” he asks.

“Honestly, Jimmy?” Kim says idly, hands tapping on the steering wheel. “Tom Joad probably left them there on his way to pick grapes in California.” 

Jimmy scoffs. 

“You know that big speech? ‘Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there?’ Well, he was wrong. _That’s_ where he is, Jimmy. He’s in that bag of potato chips,” Kim says. After a beat, she holds out her hand. “Go on, gimme some, then.” 

He and Kim crunch their way through the chips as they coast along the dark highway, listening to women sing, layered and beautiful, about beetles and eggs and blues and bells. 

* * *

“No, no, no!” Jimmy shouts, thumping his palm down on the console between him and Kim. “He would’ve been okay, she’s obviously gonna look after him—” 

“This is a stupid argument,” Kim says. 

“It’s not—”

“Jimmy, he’s a human being! He can’t suddenly, I don’t know, grow _gills_ or whatever.” 

“He might!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kim says lightly. “I guess thought we were having a serious discussion.”

Jimmy shrugs. “I didn’t realize I was speaking to a monster who thought Daryl Hannah decided to up and drown Tom Hanks.” 

“Eh, he was nothing but bad news,” Kim says. “Grow gills,” she echoes, after a moment. “That man is dead at the bottom of the Hudson.” 

“Wow,” Jimmy says.

They’ve been driving for hours, trailing headlight beams along the highway. The road’s straight and flat, curving only every now and then to duck through a small town whose residents are all asleep, or twist up a mountain range for a short time before descending again. They had followed the train tracks for a while, and once Jimmy had seen a train rush past, lights blinking in the windows, but for the most part the journey has been sparse and lonely, in that way that two people can be lonely together. Just he and Kim and the darkness outside. 

They fall into silence again a little while later, comfortable and warm. Jimmy glances over at Kim every so often, but it's hard to see her in the dark, so mostly he watches the flickering shapes of shrubs and fence-posts go by in the headlights, or the rhythmic flashes of the yellow road markings before them—off and on like a pulse. Tiredness begins to weigh on him, and the steady hum of the car and the soaring music feels ready to drag him under.

He counts the yellow lines like sheep. 

It goes two in the morning. The red lines of the digital clock on the dash flick over, and he’s almost starting to wonder if Kim’s taking him to Mexico after all when she finally slows on the outskirts of a darkened city. The road widens out and other cars start appearing again near bright stores and all night drive-thrus. 

He and Kim coast beneath the streetlamps, glancing idly at the shopfronts and vacant parking lots. She’s studying everything with an intensity that makes Jimmy sit forward eagerly, and he tries to follow her gaze, wondering what she can be looking for. 

Eventually, she slows outside a motel, whose enormous neon sign seems a perfect mirror of the beginning of the trip. _White Sands Motel_ , it says, and then beneath it in smaller letters: _Vacancy_. 

“White Sands Motel?” Jimmy murmurs, as Kim pulls to a stop on the forecourt. He clears his throat. “This us?”

Kim glances over at him and makes a face. “Where’s your sense of adventure? Wait here,” she says, and she hops out of the car and then peers in. “Maybe clean up our crap?” 

Jimmy fills the empty chip packet with the garbage they’ve accumulated over the last few hours then scrunches it all up into a ball and tucks it into the glove box. He hums to himself and rubs his eyes with the pads of his fingers.

The bright neon of the motel sign flares blearily in his vision, but he studies it until Kim comes back. 

She drives them over to one of many blue-doored rooms and parks up outside. “The guy back there said they’d just aired-out this one,” Kim says, and she glances at Jimmy. “A _little_ bit Norman Bates.” 

“I’ll check behind the picture frames,” Jimmy says, and he stifles a yawn behind his hand. 

They get out of the car and Kim unlocks the room, jiggling the key in the lock for a while before it sticks. She pushes the door inwards. The motel room is small and cramped and, whatever the guy had told Kim, it smells like it hasn’t been properly aired since the place was built. 

“Oh, wow,” Jimmy says, taking it in. “I don’t think anyone’s even been _in_ here since the 70’s.” 

“I thought you’d rather share a bed again than pay extra,” Kim says lightly, gesturing to the bed.

Jimmy nods, and he kicks off his shoes and flops face forward onto the covers. “Mmrf,” he says, then a few moments later he rolls onto his back. He waves his hand over the air like he’s making the letters appear before him: “The White Sands Motel.”

“Shut up,” Kim says. “Go to sleep. We’ll see it in the morning.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says, and he rolls back over onto his stomach. The duvet smells dusty but not too bad, really, and Jimmy nestles his face into it. He hears Kim moving around the room, and then the bathroom door opens and the shower starts running a few minutes later. 

It’s strange to think that it was only earlier this evening that they were sitting in Flying Star eating burgers and fries. It feels like a lifetime ago already, and Jimmy realizes that if you asked him how the two of them got here he could barely figure out how to answer. He lies there pondering it, wondering if they’d even spoken aloud before deciding to follow Route 66 out of Albuquerque.

Eventually, the noise of the shower shuts off and he hears the bathroom door open again. 

“Budge up,” Kim says, and he scoots over, but keeps his face pressed down into the covers.

“Man, driving is tiring,” he says, voice muffled. 

The bed shifts beside him. “Oh yeah, that must’ve really taken it out of you,” Kim says wryly. 

Jimmy sits up and glances over at Kim. She’s wearing an oversized, novelty Route 66 shirt, and he lets out a bark of laughter. It’s dark blue and tie-dyed with an enormous graphic on the front. “Wow, gorgeous,” he says. “I like the American flag and the motorbikes.”

“Hey, I brought this from home,” Kim says, and Jimmy chuckles. 

He groans and swivels his legs off the bed, then shimmies out of his jeans so he’s just in his boxers and the turquoise Bugs Bunny shirt. Kim’s climbed under the covers and he peels them back on his side then slips in beside her. The bed is comfortable enough, and Jimmy stifles another yawn behind his fist as he pulls the duvet up over his chest. He can feel tiredness tugging on him harder now that he’s horizontal, and he lets his muscles sink into the mattress. 

“Tomorrow, huh?” he murmurs, rubbing his eyes again, determined to keep them open for a little while longer. “Tomorrow we go to Mexico?”

Kim gives a light little laugh, and then yawns. She reaches beside the bed and flicks off her light. “Tomorrow,” she says, rolling onto her side. “Night, Jimmy.”

Jimmy turns off his own light, and adjusts the covers over his chest again. “Night, Kim,” he says softly, staring upwards. 

There’s a crack of light shining through the hotel room’s curtains, and it spreads out over the flaking paint of the ceiling like a prism, refracting, shifting colors a little as it thins and fades. Every so often cars and trucks drive past on the main road outside, a humming rush of wheels. In and out like a swell. 

“Thanks for asking me to run away with you,” Kim whispers some time later, voice so soft Jimmy almost doesn’t hear it. 

He breathes. His right hand's resting between the bed-sheets near his thigh, and he shifts his pinky finger slightly over the cotton. He can feel Kim in the bed beside him even though he is not touching her, a weight and a warmth on his right.

“Thanks for running,” he says finally. He closes his eyes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!
> 
> if you want to listen to the same music as kim and jimmy did on their drive to alamogordo, i've posted a playlist on [my tumblr here](https://jimmymcgools.tumblr.com/post/620779799262216192/a-playlist-inspired-by-the-cassettes-kim-wexler)
> 
>  **♥♥ and please go check out[transatlanticalien's beautiful, GLORIOUS art of jimmy in his new purchases](https://transatlanticalienart.tumblr.com/post/621119135345229824/donation-commission-for-jimmymcgools-of-a-very)**  
> they're doing pay-what-you-want donation commissions right now and matching what you pay, with all proceeds going to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust or another charity of your choosing ♥


	11. White Sands National Monument

Jimmy studies Kim over his coffee the next morning. They’re having a late breakfast at a diner across the street from the motel. It’s the kind of place you can find almost anywhere, with a line of griddles hissing behind a long bar and blue-vinyl booths edging the outer walls. He and Kim are both still in their novelty t-shirts—though he thinks Kim wears it better, tucked into her jeans, with her hair pulled up in a bun. A couple of loose strands dangle on her shoulders. 

She tilts her head sideways at him. “What’s up?”

Jimmy grins and shrugs. He sets his coffee down and digs into his stack of chocolate chip pancakes, spearing pieces with his fork and shoving them in his mouth. “So how’d you hear about this place, anyway?” he asks around a mouthful of pancakes. 

“What, this diner?” Kim asks innocently. 

Jimmy gestures to a big poster for the White Sands National Monument. “Come on, Kim, your secret’s out.” He clicks his fingers a couple of times. “Spill.”

Kim grins. “It’s where they shot _Hang ‘Em High_.” She stares at him. “Clint Eastwood? I thought you were the big fan.” 

Jimmy grimaces. 

“I’ll watch it with you some time,” Kim says. 

“Deal.” Jimmy takes another bite of pancakes and chews thoughtfully. “Man, d’you know who makes the best pancakes?” He pops another slice into his mouth and then says, “Chuck.” 

“Oh yeah?” Kim asks. “With a little smiley face in the chocolate chips?”

“Nah,” Jimmy says, and then he shrugs. “They’re just great. No idea how. I think Grammy Davenport taught him before she moved into the home.” 

“‘Grammy’, huh?” Kim says, eyes twinkling. 

“Shut up,” Jimmy says warmly. He stabs another bit of pancake and glances out the diner window, to where unknown mountains rise above the flat roofs of the hotels and restaurants. Brown and mottled, they make it look like the land is rippling, folding up toward the sky. 

He and Kim finish their food and head back to her car. The sky is marbled, a cerulean blue rippled with flecks of white, and though it’s just gone midday it’s still pleasant out, maybe mid 70s. Jimmy settles into the passenger seat and winds down his window for the brief drive to a nearby Walmart. They fill the trunk of Kim’s car with water and supplies, and then they’re back out on the road, pulling away from the city of Alamogordo and following the signs for White Sands National Monument. 

Jimmy takes in the boundless countryside by the light of day: the patchy shrubs dotting the brown dirt, the sporadic telephone poles, the brief glimpse of a shallow lake reflecting the clouds above. It’s no wonder he couldn’t see many lights beyond the road last night; there’s nothing but endless desert out here, until behind them the mountains and before them the fading horizon. 

Soon, they’re pulling off the highway again. The White Sands visitor center is close to the road, its buildings the same earthen color as the land. He and Kim follow clay paths inside, lingering briefly beside signs describing an ancient tropical paradise crowded with mammoths, beside signs depicting old military airplanes flying through the blue skies. 

Inside the visitor center there’s even more placards and dioramas, and Jimmy stops beside one that says, _Nature’s Laboratory_. His eyes skim the text for a moment, then he turns to Kim. “So did you pick the nerdiest place in the state on purpose or what?”

Kim stares are him flatly. “Jimmy, we passed a space museum on our way here.”

Jimmy grimaces. “Fair enough,” he says. He shifts over a bit. “Huh, look at that little critter!” A pocket mouse peeks out from a collection of other white animals superimposed on the sands. Beside it is a picture of a white cricket that looks so fake Jimmy leans in closer. “How’d they even find one of those to take a photo of it?”

“I have no idea,” Kim says, smile ghosting on her face. 

They move slowly through the center, pausing over each display. There’s a couple of other people around, and a loud family enters for a few minutes at one point, the kids screaming incomprehensibly; but for the most part the room is quiet, and Jimmy feels the need to whisper when he speaks, as if they’re in some grand museum instead of the visitor center of a local tourist attraction. 

A display entitled _Surviving in a Moving Landscape_ shows how the dunes can shift almost forty feet a year in places, driven by high winds, and Jimmy unconsciously makes a little interested humming noise.

“See?” Kim murmurs, glancing sidelong at him. “All those idiots driving straight there are missing out, they’re not going to know about the—” she leans forward and peers at the next board “—the plight of the bleached earless lizard.” She stands upright. “Never mind, we can go now.”

“Yes,” Jimmy hisses, drawing out the ‘s’ sibilantly. 

Kim thanks the Parks Department woman behind the front desk, and they wander back to her car. Jimmy stares at the countryside as Kim pulls out of the parking lot and follows the side-road further away from the highway, passing a couple of small hillocks that look nothing at all like the vast rolling dunes he saw countless photographs of inside the visitor center.

They stop at the ticket gate and pay the entry fee. The woman in the booth looks tired, and she counts out their change slowly. As they idle there, waiting, Jimmy notices a haze in the distance, glowing slightly, like sea spray on a violent day. 

And then onward. The road is thin and winding, framed on the left by more of the small hills. 

The dirt looks a little paler already, Jimmy thinks. “Do you know how far?” he asks, glancing over at Kim.

She shakes her head. 

Minutes pass. Guitars clang through the car stereo, high smashing symbols, a sea of sound. The dunes on their left become increasingly pale, and soon afterwards Jimmy can start to make out distant white mounds, curving in a line across the receding road and out to the right. He suddenly recalls a story he read in high school, and he understands part of it now, because the far-off dunes _do_ look like white elephants—herds of them, frozen in place. 

Though the dunes move, he remembers. He wonders which direction they’re headed. 

The tape in the stereo stops playing but neither or he or Kim move to change it. They drive in silence past signs that warn of unexploded ordnance hidden in the sands. 

Shades of white appear in the verge beside the embankment, now. The road is dead flat, but it feels to Jimmy like the car is climbing higher and higher through the foothills of a mountain, and he’s watching the first patches of snow emerge in the shadowed places. He and Kim ascend these faux peaks slowly, the whiteness around them growing bit by bit, the color seeping away from the land, as if, like David Niven in _A Matter of Life and Death_ , the two of them are climbing to the other world, all light and shadows. 

They keep driving until there’s almost no brown earth left, and only sharp tussock grasses poke up, resilient. Soon, the white sand begins to pile beside the road like snowbanks, too, and a thin layer of the dust coats the surface of the asphalt. Kim takes the corners slower and slower, tires crunching. The noise of it is quieter than he would expect, fuzzy. The dunes seem to swaddle the sound as snow does, that empty-aired silence of a fresh fall. 

As they drive onward, stereo off, wheels humming, Jimmy wonders if it’s not the snow but the color that does the muffling: white itself leeching noise from the world. 

Here and there they see parked cars and small figures traversing the slopes, but they carry on. The road cuts a swathe through the dunes, and soon the sealed surface is covered entirely in white—until, other than the occasional tire-mark and the sloping embankments, it’s impossible to tell there’s a road before them at all. 

Jimmy turns to Kim and laughs out loud at the absurdity of it: driving through New Mexico with his window down, the weather warm, and before him a kind of pristine white wonderland that seems more like it’s lifted from a storybook than any winter he’s really experienced. 

Kim grins back at him. 

“All right,” Jimmy says. “This was a pretty good idea.”

Kim bows her head and does a little twirl with her hand. “Thank you, thank you.”

Ahead of them, the road curves sharply to the left, visibly looping back on itself, and beside it a tiny wooden shack decorates a sparsely populated parking area. 

“I think this is it,” Kim murmurs, pulling off the road and parking up beside a minivan. She lifts her hips to pull a brochure from her back pocket and then unfolds it, staring at the map inside for a few moments before nodding.

Jimmy pops open his door and steps out of the car, stretching out his shoulders. The parking area is dirty with kicked-up sand, and all around them white dunes rise, pockmarked by grasses. Three children run up and down one of the nearby slopes and laugh loudly, and nearby a group of adults gather before a tour guide. 

He and Kim wander over to the closest dune. They climb it slowly, the sand collapsing in little furrows beneath their feet. At the top, Jimmy looks back to where they came from, to the mountains, soft and indistinct. He realizes that the haze he saw from afar was actually the white sand of the dunes, picked up by the wind and left hanging in the air like a fine fog. Almost unnoticeable, but just enough to blur the edges of the outside world. 

He can’t see the end of the dunes from here, can’t see the end of the folding white sands that rise and fall around them. 

“How come I didn’t know there were places like this?” he asks softly, turning to Kim. 

She glances over at him and a grin bursts onto her face. “Because you haven’t seen _Hang ‘Em High_.” 

Jimmy laughs brightly, and Kim joins in. She gestures, and they descend the dune again, feet skimming down in small avalanches in the sand. They walk back to Kim’s car and she pops the trunk, and they start sorting through supplies. Jimmy cracks open a bottle of sunblock and squeezes some onto his palm then rubs it onto his face thickly, reaching around to do the back of his neck. 

“Good?” he says, turning to Kim when he’s done. 

She chuckles and rubs in a bit on his cheek, then takes the bottle from him. Jimmy sorts through bottled water and food and packs them into a brand new backpack then slings it over his shoulder, looking up towards the sun. It’s high above them, but still not too hot, and Jimmy squints at it for a moment then tucks his hat down a little lower on his head. 

There’s a trailhead off the parking lot, and he and Kim follow the red trail-marker posts out into the dunes like breadcrumbs. The path between each post is marked with footprints, and every now and then a set split off, or loop around and climb a nearby dune. He and Kim follow the trail for a while longer and then break off, too, heading out into the white hills for a couple of minutes, until there’s no trace of the other visitors, no trace of anybody at all but their own unsteady footsteps over the undulating ground behind them. 

Jimmy stops at the crest of a dune, the sand dropping away in concave arches below. He bends down and picks up a handful of the stuff, rubbing it between his fingers. It’s finer than any sand he’s ever felt—more like flour than anything, and it’s completely cool to the touch despite the afternoon sun. 

“So I guess there used to be a big lake here,” Kim says, staring out over the edge of the dune. 

Jimmy nods, trying to picture it. The artwork in the visitor’s center had depicted mammoths and giant sloths in the grasslands around the lake, lush and vibrant. Now it’s almost empty, textured only by the wind, little wrinkles spreading out in great zigzagged curves. 

He shrugs off his backpack and sits on the edge of the slope, running his fingers through the cold sand again. It’s so soft that the cool temperature is the main reason he can tell he’s touching it at all, and he thinks about the shards of gypsum—of glass, it had seemed to him, looking at the diagrams earlier. A substance so brittle it can be ground to a powder by the wind. 

And Jimmy can see that wind now, lifting the sand from the crests of the dunes like spindrift off the top of a wave. 

Kim sits down beside him and gestures for a bottle of water, and Jimmy hands her one. She cracks the top and drinks, then nestles the bottle into a little divot beside her. After a moment, she bends forward and slips off her shoes, and Jimmy does the same. 

He wiggles his bare toes in the sand. “Fists with your toes,” he says.

Kim chuckles. “Better than a shower and a cup of coffee.” 

Jimmy rolls his jeans up to his knees and spreads his legs out on the slope, shifting them slightly, like he’s making a snow angel. 

“Oh shit,” Kim says suddenly, sitting upright. She turns to Jimmy. “Andrea. I didn’t leave a message or anything.”

“Uh oh,” Jimmy says, raising his eyebrows. 

“She’s going to think I’ve been kidnapped,” Kim says. “She’s pretty hyperbolic.”

“You reckon she’ll even notice?” Jimmy asks. “You must’ve fallen asleep in the library a bunch, right? A little—” he holds up a finger and his thumb “—snatched moment of sleep between three and four in the morning.”

Kim stares at him dryly.

“That was my first image of you, remember?” Jimmy says. “Snoozing over a book somewhere you shouldn’t be.” 

“I actually try not to make a habit of it,” Kim says lightly, but she shrugs. “I’ll phone her when we get back later. God knows she’s stayed out enough nights with strange men that I’ve stopped worrying if she doesn’t show for a couple of days.” 

“And if we see any search-party choppers flying past, we’ll just, like, flag ‘em down,” Jimmy says. He scrunches his toes in the gypsum sand, then hops to his feet again. Kim holds out her water and he takes it and shoulders the backpack, and then they move on, heading back to the trail. 

The red markers carry on, and he and Kim follow them, barefoot. Jimmy keeps an eye out for white snakes and scorpions and whatever else dangerous might have adapted to the landscape here, but eventually he relaxes, enjoying the soft sand between his toes. The trail leads them circuitously around the dunes, climbing some here and there, and in other places leveling out so that the route is almost flat. 

They walk for a long time, from red post to red post beneath the enormous sky. 

* * *

As the afternoon wears on, the sky clears, the speckled white clouds drifting down toward the horizon and then vanishing completely until there’s nothing left but blue. He and Kim sit on the peak of another dune, looking out at the endless ripples of white. 

Sometimes, Jimmy thinks he sees a lizard skitter across the sand, or a pocket mouse dart between bushes, but then he remembers the sign in the visitor’s center saying that most of the animals who live here are nocturnal and figures he must be seeing things. Other than a couple of distant birds, there’s no wildlife about at all. 

“I wonder if Chuck’s ever been out here,” he says, watching fine sand blow across the dunes. After a moment, he turns to Kim. “Probably not, he’s so busy.”

Kim frowns. “How long has he lived in Albuquerque?”

Jimmy makes a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know. Twelve years?” He frowns and scratches his ankle. “He’s never actually told me why he picked it.” 

“He’s married, right?” Kim says. “I’ve seen his wife around a couple of times.”

Jimmy nods. “Yeah, but he was out here a long time before that.” He realizes he doesn’t actually know how Chuck and Rebecca met. At the opera? he thinks, absurdly. It would have to be someplace fancy. Someplace worthy. 

Jimmy digs his feet into the sand, watching the powder swell over the arch of each foot and swallow it. He wriggles his toes and little pockmarks appear in the sand—unsettled. “I was married, too, actually,” he says suddenly, and then when Kim raises her eyebrows he chuckles. “Sorry, train of thought.” He laughs again at her expression and then says, “Twice, even.”

“Huh,” Kim says, and her eyes twinkle as she pretends to study him. “Just trying to picture it.”

Jimmy holds his hands out winningly, then drops the pose and laughs. “Don’t worry, they couldn’t either, in the end.” He turns back to the vanishing dunes and stares out at the horizon. The sun is drifting downwards, hazing with light. “It’s nothing like what you’re imagining. No kids, no dogs, no house in the suburbs.”

Kim snorts. “That’s so not what I was thinking.”

Jimmy faces her again. “Okay, fair enough.” He studies her, and, like months ago in the bar, he knows that she’s never going to ask him about this—she’s going to wait for him to tell her, or just be content not knowing. Part of him wishes she would ask. 

She wraps her arms loosely around her knees, palms cupping her elbows. 

And of course the story spills out of him anyway, voice measured and careful. “The first time I was just dumb and eighteen,” Jimmy says. “I was off and on with her all through high school, or until I dropped out, anyway. But a bunch of kids drove down to Vegas after graduation, and I tagged along like a bad smell. A real drunk one.” He shakes his head slowly. “It lasted the summer, and then she moved away to college, and Dad was—well, she needed to move away, and I didn’t. So that was that.”

Kim examines him, her eyes soft. She gives him a small smile, and then after a moment she says, “I can’t believe in a building full of lawyers I’m spending time with the one high school drop out.” 

Jimmy makes a shocked face. “Hey, I got my diploma. Eventually. Even got into college.”

“Wow,” Kim says, and she smiles at him. 

“College of DuPage,” Jimmy says, and he holds up his fist. “Go Chaps!” He lowers his hand again. “I was a few credits short of graduating, though. Got _this_ close.”

“Horseshoes and hand grenades, huh?” Kim says. 

Jimmy grins and gives a little shrug. “Guess so. But that’s where I met Lisa. Numero dos.” He stares out over the dunes, to where the sky beyond the horizon is filling with puddles of yellow light. The shadows of the tussock grasses grow long and thin, and they stretch out in soft blues toward him and Kim. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth about the sunroof thing,” he says, finally. “Chet didn’t just owe me money. Me and Lisa…we were pretty good. For a long time. She did theater, and in college it seemed like she was really going places with it, you know?” He twists to face Kim.

She’s watching him with half her face bathed in the light of the lowering sun. 

Jimmy sighs. “But then the roles started drying up, and neither of us were really working, and it was just like…” He makes a little hissing noise, then says, “Powder keg. I stopped coming home most nights, and I got into some really stupid stuff, and eventually she cheated on me with this hot-shot theater director.” He can feel his face twisting into a sneer as he says the next word: “Chet.”

“Chet,” Kim echoes, voice soft. 

“And the worst part is, I introduced them! Because he was dating _Mom_ ,” Jimmy spits, and he reflexively rubs the back of his hand over his mouth, as if wiping away the taste of those words. Familiar feelings boil up in his stomach, acidic and hateful, and he grits his teeth and tries to swallow them back down again. Tries to douse them before they catch. “What a fucking mess.” 

Kim is silent for a long time, until he turns to face her. She folds her lips inwards and studies him, then tilts her head and gives a little smile. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this in your stupid sombrero hat.” 

Jimmy snorts. After a moment, he says, “Kim, it’s a hat on a hat.” 

“Yeah,” Kim says. She reaches over and takes it off his head. Smooths out his bangs with a finger that leaves a glimmering trail over his forehead. Then she slips the hat onto her own head, tucking her bun through the back.

“Wow,” Jimmy says. 

Kim shrugs. “Now I don’t have to look at it.” 

Jimmy chuckles lightly and stares back out at the shadows lengthening over the dunes. The sky is swelling with the sunset now, rose-colored splashes of paint along the horizon. The white sands seem almost to reflect it, becoming nacreous with pink and yellow and orange, taking on the color of the world above. 

“Hey,” Kim says quietly. 

Jimmy turns to her. “Hey,” he echoes. 

She gives a folded little smile and shrugs. 

Jimmy shrugs back. He glances down at his feet buried in the sand and wiggles his toes, then faces Kim again. The brim of the hat casts a diagonal stripe of blue shadow over her face. “That’s the talking hat, you know,” he says, after a moment. 

“Oh yeah?” Kim asks, raising her eyebrows. 

“Yep, I’m all done now, no more McGill family tragedies for today,” Jimmy says. He mimes zipping his lips and throwing the key out into the dunes. Then he indicates Kim, and makes a gesture for her to speak.

She gives a small huffed laugh and looks away from him. Her eyes shift a little, tracing her thoughts like printed letters over the white surface of the desert.

Jimmy watches her. The air is cooling, and he feels the chill of it on his bare forearms as the wind picks up behind them, shifting the sands onward. “I’m just kidding,” he says softly. 

“I know,” Kim says, and her eyes flick back to him. “I know that.” She smiles, then says, “Would you believe that you’re the only person here I’ve even told the name of my hometown?”

Jimmy nods slowly, though she’s not looking at him anymore but back out at the setting sun. 

“I’m not ashamed of being from there,” Kim says crisply. She shakes her head as if to shake that thought of her mind. “Not at all. But I wanted a blank slate. Nothing and nobody carrying over. A clean break.” She glances at him once more. 

Jimmy nods again.

“This place reminds me of it, though,” Kim says, sweeping her hand out. “I didn’t think that it would, but…white covering the fields. Farmers coming into the supermarket and brushing the snow off their shoulders and griping about the turn in the season.” She blows a stray hair away from her face. “I guess they just wanted somebody to listen to them. But it bugged me. Like they expected me to fix the weather for for them, too, in between bagging their groceries.”

The wind rises again, whipping the sleeves of Jimmy’s shirt against his upper arms. He hugs his legs and presses his forearms on the bare skin of his knees beneath his rolled up jeans. 

“I’m glad you told me about them, you know,” Kim says quietly. 

Jimmy nods again, and when Kim glances over he smiles effacingly, and she returns it, then goes back to staring at the dunes. The wind blows more loose threads of her hair forward. 

“There was a time when I thought I could get married,” she says. “It even seemed almost inevitable. Like getting wound up so tight and then released on a path. And you just follow it without questioning anything.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. The sands scatter past them, wheeling over the dunes, ground finer and finer by the milling wind. 

“There’s not a lot of choice in Red Cloud,” Kim says. “So when you think you’re _stuck_ in Red Cloud…” 

Jimmy tightens his grip on his elbows and squints into the yellowing sun. The sky around it glows amber. West, he thinks. “But you weren’t stuck in Red Cloud,” he says. 

“No,” Kim says. She sighs. “No, I found out I wasn’t.” 

Jimmy turns to her. The sun is so low her entire face is lit by it now, and it seems to catch in her eyebrows and eyelashes, little flecks of gold dust. The treasure of the Sierra Madre, loosed to the winds and landed here. 

Kim breathes out, a long lilting breath, then she meets his eyes and gives a little laugh. “So you’ve got sandwiches somewhere in that backpack, right?”

Jimmy chuckles, and he turns and reaches behind him for the bag and goes to unzips it—but he pauses for a moment, eyes drawn to the long shadows cast backward by the two of them, rippling over the white dunes. They stretch away so far they seem to vanish before they end. 

Then Jimmy turns back, and hands Kim her sandwich, and the two of them eat, watching the sun wink and dip below the horizon. The sky and the sands bleed out, kaleidoscopic with pearlescent light, and the wind carries glinting flurries of sand around the the two of them. 

The vastness of the sky is staggering, and the vastness of the dunes is staggering, and as Jimmy inhales the air and the colors he thinks that there could be nothing more opposite of a Cook County jail cell than this exact spot in the middle of the White Sands National Monument.

* * *

He and Kim walk back to the car in twilight, the sky still a soft blue and light enough to see their way by. The red posts lead them to the parking lot, and they sit on the trunk of Kim’s car dusting off their feet. The white sand is dry and fine and brushes away easily. 

On the drive back, they experience their earlier journey in reverse: the white dunes becoming colorful beneath the beams of the headlights, shades of brown and ocher that now seem vibrant and multi-hued compared to the gypsum. Jimmy rolls his window down again, and he watches shrubs and power-poles and then eventually storefronts flash past in the night. Alamogordo is lively, and Kim slows as they pass chain restaurants and motels, more neon signs shining. 

They approach a building modeled after an old-fashioned drive-in diner, outlined in glowing pinks and blues, advertising frozen custard. It’s curving and retro futuristic, pulled straight from _American Graffiti_. Jimmy indicates it, and a few minutes later he and Kim are leaning against her car in the chill evening, holding sundaes in plastic cups. 

They eat in companionable silence for a while, the taste of mint bright on Jimmy’s tongue. His grasshopper sundae is an unnatural green color and it seems almost to glow like the neon lights above them. Kim’s, too, is garish: strawberry and pecan, shining bright pink. 

A young couple with a pair of bickering kids emerges from the store, loaded down with sundaes. One of the kids has a blotchy face, red and angry, like he’s just finished crying; and the older kid wears a resigned, empty expression that reminds Jimmy of Chuck. 

He slips his spoon out of his mouth and turns to Kim. “D’you have any siblings?”

Kim shakes her head. 

“Didn’t think so,” Jimmy says, eating another spoonful of frozen custard. 

Kim’s eyes twinkle. “Oh yeah?”

“Nah, you’re definitely the resourceful, only kid type.” 

“I seem to remember you also thinking I was the resourceful, big city type,” Kim says lightly, smiling sideways at him. 

“Prft,” Jimmy says, waving dismissively with his long spoon. “That guy didn’t know what he was talking about.” The kids pile into the back of the minivan, bickering with each other. Jimmy’s sure their sundaes aren’t going to last long, and he watches the red tail-lights of the van accelerate down the main road, then turns back to Kim. He wonders which line to walk; he wonders how carefully to walk it. After a moment, he says, “I have more predictions.”

Kim lifts her eyebrows, smiling slightly around her spoon. 

Jimmy holds up fingers, counting them down: “You had a dog. You got all A’s in school. And the first guy you ever slept with is the guy you were thinking about earlier when you said you could’ve got married.”

Kim stares at him for a moment, and then she holds out her hand. “Zero for three. Pay up.” 

Jimmy chuckles and gently slaps her hand down. “Really, though?”

Kim shrugs. 

Jimmy studies her. “Yeah. I guess you’re a real person and not, like…Molly Ringwald.”

“I’ve got some big news for you, Jimmy,” Kim says wryly. “Molly Ringwald is a real person, too.” 

He laughs louder this time, turning away and leaning back against the car. “Well, jeez, I hope I get to meet her one day, then,” he says lightly, staring out at the lights of the traffic whirring by. The stream of cars and trucks is steady, and he remembers that this is the main road through the city, and that all these people could be heading someplace else entirely: Santa Fe or Roswell or Mexico. “So what do you want to do tomorrow?” he asks, watching the headlights streak past. 

Kim is silent, and he turns to face her. She shrugs. “We’ll figure that out tomorrow,” she says. 

Jimmy nods, digging his spoon back into the frozen custard and taking another bite. The mint is cool on his tongue when he breathes in, like ice. 

“I actually would have really liked a dog, you know,” Kim says a short while later, and Jimmy turns to look at her. She smiles at him. “So, half points.”

“Half points,” Jimmy echoes warmly.

They finish their frozen custard beneath the bright pink and blue lights of the store, and linger for a long while outside watching the cars, then head back to the motel.

Inside their room, Jimmy stares out through the slats of the blinds at the glowing highway sign, listening to Kim have a stilted conversation with her roommate over the phone. He can see the traffic driving onward from here, too, the yellow beams of the headlights. 

After a while, he swivels the blinds closed and hunts around unsuccessfully for a remote for the television. He finds a pile of brochures for local attractions, and dumps them on the coffee table, but eventually just has to hit the button on the set itself. It winks on with a buzz: there’s an old rerun of _Saturday Night Live_ playing, Belushi and Ackroyd shouting about cheeseburgers and Pepsi and chips. Jimmy flops down into an armchair beside the bed. 

Kim hangs up the phone and makes a disgusted scoffing noise. She hops up on the bed next to Jimmy’s chair and sits with her legs crossed. “Pass me that stack of brochures?” she asks, and Jimmy hands over the pile from the coffee table. 

“All good with Andrea?” Jimmy asks. 

“She spent the whole conversation telling me about a loud woman she had a run-in with at the movies,” Kim says. “So, yes. I don’t think she’d noticed I was gone until I mentioned it.”

Jimmy chuckles, and goes back to staring at the television. The sketches roll on, and he laughs quietly as Gilda does Roseanne Roseannadanna and Bill Murray performs his lounge singer routine in a ski lodge. He can hear Kim sorting through the brochures beside him. 

“What do you think?” Kim says, holding up one for the space museum. 

Jimmy makes a pained expression. 

“They have the bones of the first chimp to go to space,” Kim adds, widening her eyes, and waving the brochure tantalizingly. “And a rocket.” 

He tips his head to the side. “Hmm. I could maybe get behind a dead space chimp.” 

“I’ll put it in the ‘yes’ pile, then,” Kim says, placing it on her left. She frowns down at the next few brochures, reading them thoughtfully and making a comment here or there. She’s let her hair out and it falls loosely around her head, wavy from being tied up all day. 

Jimmy spends more time watching Kim’s eyes flicker over the text of the brochures and her hands turn the pages than he does watching the rest of _SNL_. He rests his chin on the palm of his hand and takes in her movements silently, meeting her eyes every time she glances up and smiling at her around his fingers. She smiles back. 

Soon, stop-motion lobsters are climbing the Rockefeller Center, and, instead of the cast hugging on stage, the show ends with the credits rolling over a screen of white noise. Kim reaches the bottom of her stack of brochures, and she tosses aside one for the city zoo as the channel transitions to a spinning globe and the _NBC Nightside_ logo. 

The news starts up and Jimmy groans, pushing himself to his feet and walking over to turn off the set. He can feel the tingle of static electricity as his fingers pass near the screen, and he remembers running his hand over their television when he was younger—how it had felt like cleaning it, wiping away the invisible fuzzy static that had seemed to blanket the curved surface. 

He presses the power button and the TV goes dark. He turns turns back to face Kim.

She’s watching him from the bed, cross-legged, her hair spilling over the shoulders of her Route 66 shirt. The amber light of the lamp hits the edges of her. She glances down at her pile of ‘yes’ brochures and sifts through them idly, then looks back up at him, eyes intense. 

Jimmy stares into her gaze a long moment, then breathes out. “That was a good day,” he says. 

Kim nods. “It was a good day,” she repeats. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, nodding too. His pulse thuds beneath his jaw. He watches Kim: he can see her chest rising and falling from here, up and down steadily. “Really good,” he says, after a moment. 

Kim laughs at that, and Jimmy chuckles, too, staring at her. Her eyes sparkle and she shrugs. He shrugs back. 

“So,” he says, voice high and light. He exhales and gives a winning smile, but his next question comes out a little breathier and a little more strangled than he would like: “Wanna make out again, then?” 

Kim laughs once, eyebrows lifting. She stares at him and doesn’t say anything. 

Jimmy holds his hands out to either side and stands there, blood loud in his ears. 

She looks him up and down as if taking his measure, and then eventually, she says, “Okay,” and she starts laughing brightly, seemingly just at the sight of him. 

He grins in response, and then he walks over to the bed and leans down and grabs the back of her head and kisses her—and it’s like a jolt rushing through him, like everything he’s been holding back for the past week comes smashing up through a frozen surface and he can breathe again. 

Their noses clash and Kim chuckles against his mouth then moves back, grabbing for his upper arms and tugging him backward, too, pulling him onto the bed. They clamber across the covers, and Kim shoves all the useless brochures aside and grabs at his shoulders, dragging him up closer and spreading her legs to make space for him between them. Jimmy moves over her, holding himself up above her.

He stares down at her between his hands, at her blue eyes gazing up at him intensely, and he exhales deeply—and then sees that he’s leaning on her hair. Kim shakes her head dismissively, but he shifts his weight back to his knees and reaches for her hair again, this time gathering it up gently and tucking it up on the pillow as best he can, running the soft threads through his fingers. He takes her in: her eyes shining and bright and her mouth half open and her hair woven loosely around his hand, and he lets out all his breath, one long shaking gasp. 

Then he leans over her and kisses her again, and she tastes like strawberries and pecans—sweet and a little bitter.

Kim runs her palms up over his waist, featherlight. Not holding him up—just grazing his side and his hips as he props himself on his forearms above her. Jimmy kisses her deeper, chasing the taste of frozen custard, and then she slips her hands beneath the hem of his t-shirt.

He gasps at the feeling of her cool skin on his—her touch still so light, barely there—and pushes his hips against hers, and Kim grips his bare waist tighter, nails pinching at his skin. She drags her hands slowly up to his ribs then back down, running them around to the small of his back, nails digging sharp paths along the way. Jimmy breathes shallowly in between kissing her, and Kim inches her hands further down his back, slowly, and then she slips her fingers beneath the waistband of his jeans and boxers, tucking them there, skin on skin.

Jimmy breaks away from her mouth and inhales heavily, his eyes closed and all his weight on his elbows. Kim draws her hands up again, fingers slipping out of his jeans and then trailing along his sides. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and Kim murmurs, “Shift over,” and pushes at him and they twist so that she’s straddling his hips and looking down at him, hair-mussed and lips pink. 

Jimmy breathes raggedly, watching Kim runs the palms of her hands over him. His shirt’s already half up but she pushes it above his nipples, then trails her hands down his sides, palms curved and thumbs stretched out to trace twin lines along his stomach. She leaves static-fuzzed wakes on his skin, down and down—then she presses her thumbs in a little harder and Jimmy gasps, bucking up into her. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs, grabbing the backs of her hands and holding her in place.

Kim gives a light little laugh. “It’s okay, Jimmy,” she says. 

Jimmy grips the back of her hands tighter and tries to catch his breath. “Why are we doing this?” he gasps, and then he shakes his head. “I mean—why _aren’t_ we doing this?” Had he come up with reasons since he awoke in bed beside her? He can’t think of any of them now. 

Kim shifts back a little, but she leaves her hands where they rest beneath his. “To start with?” she asks softly, and she gives him a small smile. “Because you woke up and looked terrified.”

“I what?” Jimmy asks. 

Kim shrugs. “It’s okay. We were both pretty drunk.”

Jimmy shifts beneath her. He rubs his right thumb over Kim’s hand. “We’re not drunk now,” he murmurs. 

“No,” Kim says softly. “I guess not.” She stares down at him and doesn’t move. He can see her pulse thudding at the base of her throat above her shirt, flickering beneath her skin. 

Jimmy strokes his thumb back and forth. “Was I the only one?” 

“Hm?” Kim raises her eyebrows. 

“Terrified,” Jimmy adds. 

Kim sighs. She looks down to where their hands are linked and twists hers around so their fingers weave together. “No,” she says, eventually. Her eyes meet his. Words coming slowly, she says, “Jimmy, you’re not…”

—and he thinks, what? what? pulse humming in his ears—

—and, voice so careful, she says, “… part of the plan.” 

Jimmy lets out his breath in a rush of air. “Yeah,” he says lightly. He stares into her eyes. Hers are gentle, and he sighs again. He tightens his fingers. “Wanna tell me about the plan, then?” 

Kim frees one of her hands and brushes his hair away from his eyes, tracing her finger over his forehead. “Come to Albuquerque,” she says, and she brushes his hair back again, then lowers her hand so it’s resting on his stomach. “Make something of myself,” she says. “Don’t think about anyone else.” 

Jimmy holds her hand again. “We’re not in Albuquerque now,” he says. 

“No,” Kim says, smile edging her expression. “No, I guess not.”

“Seems like the plan’s already gone off the rails,” Jimmy says, and he shrugs. 

“Hm,” Kim says, mouth twitching. And then she smiles, and leans down and kisses him again, letting go of Jimmy’s hands and gripping the sides of his face.

She bites his lower lip and Jimmy groans, then Kim releases it, laughing lightly into him. She kisses him slowly, forcefully.

He runs his hands up her thighs, stopping at the top of her jeans and hooking his forefingers into her waistband so that he can drag her hips closer to his, shifting up beneath her, pressing himself tight against her. He tugs at her t-shirt, freeing it and slipping his hands up beneath the hem. The bare skin of her waist is light with downy hairs, and warm, and soft—and he runs his hands up over the curve of her ribs to the edge of her bra. 

Jimmy traces the skin at the bottom of her bra with his thumbs, stroking the same path repeatedly, and then he stops to grab her shirt again and pull it upwards, and Kim sits up to help him, tugging it over her head. He closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them, and Kim’s smiling down at him.

The yellow light of the motel lamps pools in the hollows of her clavicles, her pulse thrumming fast against her neck.

She reaches out and presses a thumb to his bottom lip, tracing the pad of it back and forth, and Jimmy stays still, and lets her outline his mouth with her touch. When she goes to move away, Jimmy turns his head, mouthing at the palm of her hand, wet and a bit messy, until Kim leans back down and kisses him again. She runs her hand down the side of his stomach, stopping at the top of his jeans, trailing feathery fingers around his waistband to the front and lingering there.

Jimmy nods against her, and Kim grazes his stomach with her fingertips, light and ticklish for what feels like an eternity, before popping open the top button. Jimmy grunts, shifting his hips upwards, and she slips her hand inside and palms him through his boxers. He grips tight into the curve of her hips, clenching his fingers into her skin, pressing his eyes shut. 

Kim squeezes him gently, then pulls back, hair falling down like a curtain around them. She murmurs, “Condom?”

“Wallet,” Jimmy gasps, jerking his head to the nightstand. 

Kim stretches over to grab the wallet, keeping her thighs on either side of him. She opens it and rifles through, then lets out a snort of laughter. “I forgot about this haircut,” she says, and she turns his wallet to face him. 

His drivers license from three years ago stares back at him, his old mullet wild and unkempt. Jimmy chuckles, tightening his grip on Kim’s thighs, and he shakes his head. “Sorely missed,” he says. 

Kim laughs brightly, turning it so she can see it again. “Imagine. This guy really showed up at the great HHM. I mean, really.”

“You guys didn’t know what hit you,” Jimmy says, stroking his thumbs back and forth. 

Kim chuckles softly. “No, we did not.” She sets the wallet down and reaches over to run her fingers through his hair. Tingles glimmer over his scalp, swelling outwards from the paths made by her nails and spreading down to the nape of his neck. Kim trails her hands back and forth, then down the side of his head, over his ears and into dips of his shoulders, and then she’s tugging at his shirt and Jimmy’s sitting up to help her pull it over his head. 

She shifts away, shimmying back off him, and she stands at the edge of the bed to unbutton her own jeans and slip out of them so she’s just in her underwear. Jimmy watches, mouth open and frozen, until she reaches up for her bra. 

“No, wait, I want to,” he says, and he shifts forward over the covers until Kim’s framed by his legs. He grips her waist and holds it for a moment, looking up at her, then he runs his hands up over her ribs and around to her back. He undoes her bra slowly, popping open the clasp and then slipping his hands up her arms to drag the bra down and off. It falls to the floor between them, and he leans forward and mouths at the soft skin between her breasts, moving his lips slowly until he reaches a nipple, and he hears Kim sigh above him.

He pulls back after a while to stare up at her, and Kim rests her palm on the side of his face for a moment, like the ghost of a touch, and then she gestures for him to shift backwards. She sets a knee on the bed beside him and lifts herself up and straddles him, sitting in his lap. 

Jimmy reaches to cup her breasts in his hands, warm and heavy, and he leans in and runs his mouth over her clavicle and then up to the pulse point on her neck. He grins and murmurs, “Tastes like sunblock,” against her skin. 

Kim chuckles, stroking the back of his head, weaving her fingers with his hair. 

He moves his hands down her hips again and finds her bare thighs, and he pulls away from her neck for a moment to look down at the two of them together, at the size of his hands arcing over her legs, almost covering them completely. He slides his palms up then twists his hands around, dancing his thumbs lightly over the soft skin of her inner thighs. Kim tightens her grip on his head, and Jimmy tilts to look up at her. 

He rubs his thumbs back and forth, moving higher and higher up the insides of her thighs, and Kim stares down at him silently, her chest rising and falling. Her grip on his hair gets tighter still, and Jimmy twists his head to lean into it, staring up into her eyes, tracing his hands up and over the smooth skin of her thighs until he’s shifting his right hand around and resting the palm of it against her stomach, his fingers teasing the edge of her underwear. 

Kim closes her eyes for a brief moment then opens them again, her gaze still trained on him. Jimmy slips his fingers under the fabric, moving them down, and Kim lays a hand over his, encouraging him onward. 

He traces light patterns, teasing her, and Kim’s grip tightens on the back of his hand as he dances the pad of his fingers around, missing all the places she’d really want to be touched. He stares into the dark of her pupils, breathing heavily, moving his finger downward. “Like this?” he murmurs, eventually, and he starts rubbing his thumb in gentle circles. Kim nods, eyes dropping closed, and then she guides the movement of his thumb a little, changing the speed until he gets it. He keeps up the rhythm for a while and then slips his middle finger down, moving it back and forth over her folds and then slipping between them and inside her. 

The hand in his hair tightens and Jimmy leans his head forwards and grins, resting his forehead on her sternum. He slips in another finger and curls them forward, and Kim’s hand clenches in his hair. He feels her lean down and kiss the top of his head, open-mouthed, and he nods, and keeps going, rubbing his thumb steadily and pressing firmly against the warmth inside her.

She starts moving against his fingers, her thighs shifting on his jeans, and the hand that was guiding him gently now holds firm on his wrist, her nails digging into the skin. Jimmy curls his fingers again and again and the nails tighten even further. Her other hand moves slick over the back of his neck, damp with sweat, twisting to tug better at his hair.

He rubs his thumb faster and presses the pads of his fingers hard against her, and her nails pinch his wrist, five pinpricks of bright pain, then she bucks against his hand once, twice, and goes still, fingers tight and jagged in his hair. 

But Jimmy can still feel her twitching around his fingers, and he closes his eyes and presses his forehead into her skin, Kim’s chest rising and falling beneath him. She untangles her hold on his hair and strokes his head, running the palm of her hand down the sweat-slicked nape of his neck for a few minutes as they catch their breath, until she finally unclenches her grip on his wrist and Jimmy slips his hand out of her underwear. He wipes it on the bed beside him and looks up at her, at her mussed hair and soft expression. Kim smiles down at him, and he returns it. 

After a moment, she slips off his lap and shimmies out of her underwear. Jimmy follows after her with his hand unconsciously, until Kim steps back between his knees and he can lay his palm on her hip. She reaches out for the front of his waistband and finally unzips his jeans, and then she slides her hands around his waist, fingers trailing beneath the denim. Jimmy lifts up his hips off the bed and they tug his pants down then he kicks them off, taking his boxers with them. 

Kim settles back onto his lap. Her bare thighs are hot against his, and Jimmy jerks at the feeling, grabbing Kim’s hips and holding her in place. Kim reaches for him and strokes him a couple of times, and he breathes heavily against her skin, fingers pawing uselessly at her shoulders. 

He feels completely undone already, and he rakes his nails over her skin and closes his eyes. She leans closely against him, her breasts firm against his chest as she reaches behind them and it’s only when he hears the sound of foil tearing that he realizes she was getting the condom. 

Jimmy takes it from her and pinches it and rolls it down over himself, glancing up at Kim, who’s watching hungrily. She meets his gaze and leans in and kisses him sloppily, open mouthed, teeth clacking. 

“Mrrf, Kim,” Jimmy grunts against her, gripping the base of his dick. 

She pulls back from his mouth, looking down at the two of them.

Jimmy hears her exhale, ragged, and he stares at their crosshatched legs for a moment too, rubbing his thumb over Kim’s hip. She lowers her hand, and the pads of her fingers wander down the sensitive skin inside his forearm, past the red half-moon indentations on his wrist, and then stop between their legs, and she holds him beside his own fingers and positions him. She starts lowering herself, the heat of her sliding around Jimmy and—

“Wait, wait, wait,” he gasps, and he grips her hip tighter, his thumb pressing into the hollow divot in the bone. He clenches his teeth and his fingers and breathes out carefully through his nose. 

Kim leans her forehead against his, chest rising and falling unevenly, hands warm on his upper arms. 

Jimmy laughs lightly and says, “Easy.” He digs his fingers into her hip, and neither of them move at all, until eventually he nods against her. Kim leans in to kiss him sloppily again, and Jimmy can barely move his mouth to keep up, he’s still so lost. 

Then she starts lowering herself onto him again, a slow push, torturously slow, intense heat enveloping him bit by bit—and then he’s completely inside her, and Kim’s thighs flex around him, and her hands clench on his arms, and she gasps into his mouth. Jimmy closes his eyes. His body feels somehow hot and cold at the same time, and it’s like coming inside from the cold to an open fire, his flesh breaking out in chills, fine goosebumps spreading over his skin.

When he opens his eyes again, Kim’s staring down at him. “Hey,” she murmurs.

“Hey,” Jimmy gasps softly. 

“You okay?” 

Jimmy nods, and they start moving together. The bed-covers are all bunched up behind them, and Kim reaches past him to shove them aside, and they shift backwards onto the sheets. She rocks slowly above him, letting him take the full weight of her, resting her hands on his chest. Her thumbs lock into small gaps in his ribcage, little points of pressure that are almost painful. 

“Is this okay?” Kim asks again, shifting down to kiss him. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy gasps, and then he nods as well, just in case. 

“Good,” Kim murmurs.

Jimmy reaches up to cup the back of her neck, holding her close, staring up at her. He shifts his hips slowly and Kim matches his speed, and he can feel her breathing against his lips, hot and damp. 

Kim trails her hands down his ribs and over his stomach and then laughs against his mouth. 

“What?” Jimmy murmurs, letting go of her neck. 

She leans back a little and runs a finger through the vee of his hips then holds it up to him. It’s covered in a fine layer of white dust. “You’ve still got some sand on you,” she says, moving against him. 

Jimmy holds her her waist lightly, shifting inside her, and he chuckles. “Can’t believe—we’re _finally_ doing this—and I’m covered in sand.”

“Finally, huh?” Kim says. She grabs his hands and lifts them off her, tangling her fingers in his and rocking forward. 

Jimmy nods. He tightens his fingers around hers and exhales deeply. “You telling me you didn’t want to do this after I got you a certain, mmrf—” Kim leans down and pecks him on the mouth then pulls back again “—a certain book?” 

“Hmm, that wasn’t the first time,” Kim says, moving their joined hands around so that she’s resting her weight down on them. “I seem to remember you coming back to the mailroom one day soaked with coffee…” 

“Really?”

Kim nods, shifting her hips slowly, and Jimmy groans. 

“Covered in coffee, huh?” he says, a few moments later. “I can arrange that again.”

Kim gives a little trill of laughter. “What?” she asks, warmly.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says, grinning. “Shut up.” He grips her fingers tighter, tugging her closer, pressing his hips up into her. He finds her mouth again and kisses it desperately, running his tongue over her lip and then inside, burning with the heat of it. 

He frees one of his hands and moves it down between them, and he lets Kim guide his finger again until he figures out the right rhythm for her, and she’s shifting above him and gasping and breathing into his mouth. They settle into it and move together for what feels almost like forever, and he thinks his skin is on fire, and he can barely catch his breath, and a muscle in his forearm is flashing with pain in a line up from his middle finger, but Kim’s grabbing his wrist again and he wouldn’t stop even if he wanted to, and the pain of it is keeping him together, anyway. She presses her forehead against his again but the contact is clumsy now, messy, bone hitting bone a little too hard and they pull back.

Jimmy jerks his hips up, and Kim tips further forward, her breasts pressing on his chest and her forearms framing his head, and she tucks her head in beside his. He helps hold her up with his free hand, his other hand is rubbing rhythmically, and Kim’s shifting against it until— 

“Jimmy,” she gasps, and then, “Fuck.” She spasms around him and Jimmy stills, breathing hard, feeling the weight of her on him. He moves his hand to the back of her neck, slipping it beneath her hair and pressing her into his shoulder until she starts to pull back, and he lets his arm slide loosely down to his side. 

Kim looks down at him, face bright, warm by the glow of the lamp, and Jimmy trails his hands over the soft skin of her lower back, moving inside her slowly. 

She sighs gently, and moves along with him, running her hand up his chest. “Do you want to try anything else?” she asks softly, cupping his cheek. 

Jimmy shakes his head. “No,” he gasps. “I’m—I’m close. This is perfect. You’re perfect. You’re gorgeous. You’re—” and the words start spilling out of him, an unbroken river of words, and Kim kisses him messily and swallows them, humming with each new mouthful. She angles her hips so that he slips in deeper, and moves faster, new words leaving him with each thrust, but then eventually he realizes she’s speaking, too, so he stops talking and listens—and it’s his name, over and over, hummed to his lips.

“Jimmy,” Kim murmurs, “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy,” and the noise of his name is exactly like humming, really, like a buzzing against his mouth, and he cradles her cheeks so he can feel the sound of it there, too, and then Kim’s reaching for his own face, their forearms criss-crossing, and her thumbs are on his jaw like rubber bands, and she’s tightening around him and then he’s coming, gasping silently into her mouth, letting Kim swallow it until there’s no sound left between them at all, no sound or words or names, just—light. 

* * *

They lie together later, tucked close on Kim’s side of the bed, avoiding the damp half of the sheets. Jimmy runs his hand down the curve of her waist, finally noticing how much sand the two of them are both covered in, ground so fine it was easy not to feel it during everything else. 

“Shower?” Jimmy murmurs. 

Kim shrugs. “Later,” she says, and she trails a finger over his stomach, dipping it in and out of his belly button, then dancing around the edge like water circling a drain. Jimmy watches the fine veins on the back of her hand, blue and sharp in the light. 

He can hear the traffic going past outside again, the drone of the cars and trucks, and somewhere in a neighboring room there’s a television on: soft muffled voices with the polished accents of newsreaders. 

“This is a pretty great motel, you know,” Jimmy says, shifting his head a little against the pillow. 

“Mhm.” Kim nods. “I can pick ‘em.” 

Jimmy laughs softly. 

She stops tracing lines over his belly and reaches for his hand where it rests loosely near his hip, pulling it close to her and studying it like a scientist. She flexes his fingers ones by one and runs her thumb over the hairs on his knuckles. Seeing it through her eyes, it almost looks like a stranger’s hand, and he keeps his muscles slack, watching his digits move beyond his control. 

“So, about that plan of yours…” Jimmy says lightly, a few minutes later.

Kim swats at his hand. “Shh. Don’t gloat.”

He chuckles, tightening his grip on her waist. “I was more interested in the first step.”

“Come to Albuquerque?” Kim says. 

“Mm,” Jimmy hums.

Kim shrugs beneath his arm. “I like snakes and tarantulas.” 

Jimmy says her name softly, and she twists up to look at him. He gives her a little smile. “You gotta admit, it’s not the most obvious choice.”

Kim looks away from him, and releases his hand. “I applied for as many programs as I could,” she says, eventually, running her finger through his chest hair, tracing letters over his skin. “Anything to help with the law school fees. And HHM were the ones who took me.” 

“Good on HHM,” Jimmy murmurs. 

Kim shrugs again. He feels her write the initials of the firm on his chest. 

“And now you're here to fight the good fight,” he says after a while. 

Kim twists and kisses his ribs, then murmurs, “That’s right,” against his skin. Jimmy weaves his fingers through her hair, following her head loosely when she shifts it back again and leans her cheek on his chest. He thinks about a younger Kim, back home in Red Cloud. A younger Kim looking for a world that makes sense. 

“Right and wrong,” he says. “Good and bad. I get that. But how’d you decide on lawyer? Not—I dunno, a cop?”

“I guess I just decided,” Kim says, running her finger in small circles on his skin and then stopping. She looks up at him again. “I’m sorry, Jimmy. That’s not fair.”

Jimmy shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Have you ever really talked to a cop?” Kim asks. “Do you know how many innocent people get locked up every day because they can’t afford a good lawyer, or the _right_ lawyer?” 

“I might have an idea,” Jimmy says softly, and Kim nods. 

“Right,” she says. “So learning the law, arguing the law, being the best at it…” She sighs. “The only people who get to control anything are the lawyers, Jimmy. Nobody else. Nobody else in this world. So why go in half-cocked?” 

Jimmy nods decisively. “Always go in full cock.” 

Kim snorts. “Shut up.”

He laughs gently then breathes out and tightens his hand on Kim. The clock on the bedside table flicks to two o’clock, and Jimmy glances over at it then looks away, his eyes tracing up the wallpaper and around the old fashioned cornice on the ceiling. His childhood bedroom back in Cicero used to have one, too, carved with vines or flowers or something in an attempt to look fancier than it was. This one is plain, just straight lines and angles. He frowns at it. 

“What’s up?” Kim asks softly. She’s looking up at him, and when Jimmy meets her gaze she runs a finger over his jaw. 

Jimmy shakes his head. “I dunno. Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Kim repeats. 

“I guess…” he says, eyes darting away for a moment, then back to hers. “I wish I could figure stuff out like that. I like having a goal. I like _doing_ things. I think I can be pretty good at it. But this shit at HHM…I don’t know. I can’t work in a mailroom forever, Kim.”

She traces his jaw again, then drops her hand. “Is anyone expecting you to?” she asks quietly. 

Jimmy shrugs. He breathes out through his nose and looks up at the cornice again. “What else can I do?” 

Kim gives a light little laugh and taps her fingers up his chest. Her voice comes liltingly, rising upwards like a scale: “You could be a lawyer?”

“Hah,” Jimmy says dryly. 

Kim stills her hand. After a moment, she slides it back towards herself and rests her chin on it, staring up at him. “Well, why not?” 

“Kim, are you kidding?” he asks. “Even if I got the rest of my credits, no law school would ever accept me, and even if they did, then I’d have to sit the exams that are practically killing _you_ , and you’re so much smarter.” 

“I don’t know why you think you’re so dumb.”

Jimmy shrugs. “Fine, maybe not. But I’m not lawyer smart, Kim. That’s Chuck. That’s not me.” 

Kim folds her lips inwards and frowns, then says. “Well, there are other jobs.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says bitterly. “The mailroom.”

“Albuquerque isn’t made up of just lawyers and mailroom workers, Jimmy. Hell, HHM isn’t. They’re a big company. They employ all sorts of people.”

He raises his eyebrows and waits. 

Kim sighs. “Uh, there’s assistants, and executive assistants, and oppo research, and IT…” she trails off, then taps the pads of her fingers on his skin thoughtfully. “What did you do at college?” 

Jimmy huffs. “Business and marketing,” he says. “But I skipped most of my classes, Kim. Barely dragged myself through the exams using good old common sense.” 

Kim rolls her eyes. “Whatever. You know, they pay people to do marketing at HHM, right? I don’t know how often they use outside firms, but they’ll have a small department of some kind, I’m sure. You could see if they ever hire from within.”

The words ring a bell in Jimmy’s head. “You know, Howard did say not to think of this as a dead-end job. Said they reward effort at HHM, or something.” 

Kim slaps his chest. “There you go.” But she stares at him for a moment, then says, “Would you want to do that, though?”

“I dunno,” Jimmy says. He tries to picture it, but he can only think of his professors at college, droning on before the class. He’s always liked the _idea_ of marketing, at least, of selling people on dreams. Convincing them to think exactly the way he needs them to think. “I’ll talk to Howard,” he says. 

Kim nods against the back of her hand, and he breathes out slowly. There’s a shimmer of white sand beneath her eye, glinting on her cheekbone. 

He swipes it away with his thumb and gives a light chuckle. “How about that shower now?” he asks, and Kim nods. 

* * *

They do go see the dead chimp, and the rocket, and all sorts of other artifacts from outer space that Jimmy doesn’t quite see the point of, wandering around the Alamogordo Space Center. There’s a moon rock that seems drab and boring considering it’s only a short drive away from a landscape that’s truly otherworldly. The moon rock just looks like a rock. 

They find that there’s not much else to do in Alamogordo, but there’s a cinema, and they catch a couple of movies. It seems like Hollywood is obsessed with trilogies that weekend: Alien 3, and Lethal Weapon 3. He’s glad he’s watching them with Kim and that they're whispering commentary to each other, because otherwise he doesn’t know if he would have made it through either film. Afterward, they stumble across another tiny museum and venture inside to see an enormous, back-lit photograph of a shroud that’s supposed to have Jesus’s body marked on it; but Jimmy just finds it creepy, not sure where he’s supposed to look, or what he’s supposed to get out of it. 

On Monday, they drive up into the mountains beside the city, stopping to wander through small villages. One is still set up like an Old West town, the street lined with the colorful square shop-fronts that Jimmy’s used to thinking of as empty facades. Surrounded by the tall pine trees of Lincoln National Forest, it’s like something out of _Pale Rider._

They get lunch at a lodge away from the village, up in the hills on strange, sprawling parklands, with duck ponds and rotundas. A sign boasts that Garland and Gable stayed there once, and another sign says the whole building burned down in the early 20th century and had to be rebuilt, and he and Kim spend the rest of their meal laughing quietly and peering around corners for Jack Torrance. And then they move on to another town, slowly winding their way back down to Alamogordo. 

But that evening, as they leave the city behind them, Jimmy only thinks of White Sands, tucked away invisibly across the flat land beside the road. He clings to the image of it in his mind, and White Sands clings to them, too: in the dust that appears in Kim’s car, and that they kept finding on their own bodies, or on each other’s bodies, late at night. 

It’s still light for the first couple of hours of the drive back, and Jimmy appreciates the broad expanse of the place, the unending borders of desert on either side of the road. He looks out at it now and wonders if there’s some unique monument, or old town clinging tight to its past, or hidden natural wonder out there, too. Something magical that might be glimpsed if he could just rise a little higher above the road, could just see a little farther beyond the horizon.

The sun has long set by the time they approach Albuquerque. They take the main highway over the Sandias this time, and the Historic Route 66 wends its way around them, cutting over bridges and through tunnels. The highway is smooth and fast, and the sound of one of Kim’s now-familiar cassettes fills the car as they crest the peak of the mountains and see the city spread out before them, a glimmering crosshatch of lights. 

Jimmy hears Kim’s hands tighten creakingly on the vinyl of her steering wheel, and he twists to look at her. Her eyes are trained on the road, and her lips are flat in thought.

He turns down the music. “Everything okay?”

“About this,” Kim says, and it’s like the two words have been waiting on the edge of her lips for the last two hundred miles, because they appear so crisply and clearly. “I don’t know how fair to you…” she says, then she breathes out, and flickers a glance over at him and clears her throat. “With classes coming back in a week, and you know how I…” 

Jimmy exhales, too. He’s been waiting for it the entire drive, been waiting for it since Saturday night, really. Waiting for her to say something, or waiting for himself to say something. He’s not sure whether he really would have, now that Kim’s locked them into this track. So instead he says, “I know. I get it.” 

She just nods. The lights of the streetlamps flash over her face. Bright then dim. 

“Beside, I got plans now, too,” he says lightly, looking back out at the road instead, at the browns and greens of the Sandias.

“Yeah,” Kim says. She breathes softly beside him, hands twisting on the wheel. 

“I got big plans,” Jimmy says, and they descend into the lights of the city. 


	12. The Sunset Drive-In

There’s a fragile air in the mailroom that morning, a quietness. The humming tension of something ready to snap. 

It’s not helped by the Halloween decorations, still up from Friday, when Burt and Jimmy had hung them high on the walls: dollar-store orange streamers and white ghoul masks cut from spare sheets of copy paper. They look on thoughtfully, as if waiting to observe the breaking point. 

The cautious atmosphere reminds Jimmy of another fragile morning, months ago—though back then it was less that Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill had changed, and more that he and Kim had. Returning to the mailroom after their trip to White Sands had felt like stepping out of a darkened movie theater and into the sunlit world, bright and too-real. 

And too populated by memories of the dream-like film that had just played before his eyes: late nights and neon lights. On that Tuesday morning after the road trip, Jimmy had walked into the mailroom like so many other Tuesday mornings, and he’d seen Kim sitting at the breakroom table, constant as always. She hadn’t noticed him for a moment, her head tipped down and expression hidden; and beneath the wash of the fluorescents she’d seemed a screen onto which were projected so many other Kims: in novelty shirts or black bras or pooled with orange light, and he didn’t know which one was real. 

But then she had looked up, and smiled, and shrugged, and he had shrugged back, and— 

Jimmy tears a paper ghoul mask from the mailroom wall. 

“Morning, Jimmy,” Burt says, wandering up behind him. 

“Hiya, Burt,” Jimmy says. He rips off another mask then turns to Burt. “Did you see it?”

Burt just lifts his eyebrows and nods. 

Jimmy makes a breathy noise like he’s blowing out steam. “Not good, huh?” 

Kim comes out of the breakroom. “Hi guys,” she says, leaning against the doorframe. “Are you talking about the dog?”

“You bet,” Jimmy says, smiling at her. 

Kim shakes her head. “Howard’s car was here when I arrived. The partners must be meeting already.” 

The Westerbrook divorce case. Months of legal bickering had finally concluded last week, and Stan Westerbrook, HHM’s client, had lost. Just in time for Halloween, Jimmy remembers thinking, and he couldn’t have been more right, because the next evening while drowning his sorrows Stan left his dog locked in his sports car with all the windows rolled up, and the poor thing had whined behind the glass for long enough that some assholes managed to film it in there before they’d rescued it. 

“You think the cameras will be back?” Burt asks. 

Kim shrugs. “Any chance to re-litigate everything in the press.” She moves beside them and stares at the paper ghouls. After a moment, she reaches past Jimmy to tear one down, her sleeve brushing his wrist. 

He moves his arm away unconsciously, but turns to look at her. “So how was the party, then?” he asks lightly.

“Filled with law students,” Kim says, meeting his eyes for a second. 

Jimmy chuckles. “How many Erics?”

“Oh, you know,” Kim says. “Hundreds.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs, pulling down more decorations. 

“Nothing like networking with a bunch of Cheech and Chongs,” Kim adds, grimacing. She tears down the last mask and then scrunches the paper up and drops it in a nearby trashcan. “I did get to see two Travis Bickles drunkenly fight on the lawn, though.”

“Jealous,” Jimmy says, drawing out the word in mock awe as he follows Kim into the breakroom. “How’s this week look?” he asks, sliding into a chair as she turns on the coffeemaker. 

Kim takes out a couple of mugs and sighs. “Not bad. But Geiger has us running the mock defense in pairs.”

“Ouch,” Jimmy says. “Who’d you get?”

“Christine.” 

“Woof,” Jimmy says, accepting a coffee when Kim hands one to him. It’s in his favorite novelty mug—a little cactus and the words, _Don’t be a prick_ —and he takes a sip, almost burning the roof of his mouth, then says, “Offer still stands, by the way.”

“Jimmy, you’re not getting one of my classmates expelled from UNM.”

“Just saying, some lightly-forged crib sheets in the right hands…” 

Kim chuckles. “Shut up.” She opens one of her ever-present law textbooks and flicks through it idly then groans. “I wouldn’t say no to a real crib sheet if you’ve got one, though.”

Jimmy raises his eyebrows and, at his silence, Kim looks up. 

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” she says quickly. “Definitely don’t get _me_ expelled for cheating.”

Jimmy shrugs. “I’ll do my best.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Kim says quietly. She sighs, and goes back to reading, brow pinched in focus. She worries at her lips as her eyes skim the paper, and a now-familiar feeling of sympathy bubbles up in Jimmy’s stomach—though so far Kim’s been a little more relaxed as a 3L, and she told him a few weeks ago that the step up to third year was not as extreme as the jump from first to second. 

A little voice in his head thinks: so you might’ve actually had time for more, then, might’ve been able to weave me into your life more completely. A cruel voice, and very small, a voice that’s easy to quash when he contemplates another option: a mailroom, an HHM, an Albuquerque with no Kim in at all. A return to the city that had seemed to greet him on his arrival so many months ago. Vast and hard and empty.

So, as with so many other mornings, Jimmy drinks his coffee and says nothing, nothing that might change the fact that, now they’re back in Albuquerque, they’re back to being Kim Wexler, hyper-focused law student and Jimmy McGill, mailroom black sheep. Full time. 

Mailroom black sheep. Because of course his own plans had fizzled almost immediately after he ignited them, snuffed by the stagnant basement air. Shortly after getting back from White Sands, Jimmy _had_ spoken with Howard, _had_ mentioned his interest in marketing, and the man had been encouraging—seemed excited, even—about the prospect of Jimmy moving up in the firm. “We’re a family here, Jimmy!” Howard had said then and has repeated on multiple occasions since, interspersed with other platitudes about keeping his head down and his nose to the grindstone and so on. 

And sure, Jimmy thinks, he’s worked here less than a year yet, so maybe he hasn’t earned anything more than that. And he could push it. He could go to Hamlin Senior, or to Chuck—though the latter doesn’t bear thinking about too hard. Hey Chuck, thanks for getting me this respectable job in your respectable castle, can I move up out of the dungeons and into the towers yet? I promise not to steal the treasure. Jimmy snorts at the thought, and takes another sip of coffee, and then, when the others arrive, goes easily to work. 

It’s quieter than usual, and, when Henry comes back down from the upper floors, he tells them something about a meeting with all the associates, all-hands upstairs in the conference room. And, sure enough, at the coffee cart over lunch, Jimmy sees a small news crew outside the building, and watches with amusement as they try to flag down anyone wearing a vaguely-professional suit and avoid any volunteers in get-out-the-vote shirts. He leans against a waist-high retaining wall and watches, sipping his coffee and crunching through his bag of chips until eventually the reporter and the cameraman just give up and wander back to their van. 

Later that afternoon, winter sunlight golden on Hamlindigo blue pillars, Jimmy’s pushing his mail cart through a first floor corridor when a hand grabs his elbow—Kim. 

“Jimmy,” she hisses, and she pulls him toward a small kitchenette, tugging at him with sharp fingers, and he follows dumbly as she hustles him inside and closes the door. “I just heard the partners—” 

But then she stops short, staring at him. Jimmy’s backed up against the counter, his hip jutting into a drawer handle. He swallows. 

Kim takes a small step backwards and holds up her hands. “Sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” Jimmy says. 

“No, I know we said not to—” 

“Yes,” Jimmy says quickly. 

“Right,” Kim says. There’s a long silence. She glances away for a moment and then looks back at him, her eyes shining bright and a smile on the edge of her lips. “Listen: I heard some of the partners talking. Howard said he wants to get out in front of this.”

Jimmy blinks. “In front of what?”

Kim waves a hand dismissively. “The Westerbrook thing. He wants a big branding push for the company. Or next thing you know we’re just the firm who represented a would-be dog murderer.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Sure.”

There’s a beat of silence. “You idiot,” Kim finally says, warmly, shaking her head. “So write up a proposal. Show them you’re serious about this.”

“Right!” Jimmy says, chuckling and propping his hands back on the countertop. “Right, okay. Okay, I got this. Uh, ‘Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill: We Won’t Kill…Your Dog’.” He grins broadly. “Yes?”

Kim scoffs, lips twitching. “Maybe give it another pass.” 

Jimmy softens his grin and nods. 

“Good,” she says, nodding too. “Good.” 

He watches her, smiling gently. When she stills, he says, “Thanks, Kim.” 

“Of course.” She stares at him for a long while, eyes intense, and for a moment Jimmy thinks he can see her pulse glimmering on her throat under her blue blouse—but then she breezily asks, “So, how was your weekend, anyway?”

“Oh, you know,” Jimmy says, his gaze returning to hers. “Went to a showing of _Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein_ and a little kid spent the whole thing kicking the back of my seat.” He tightens his grip on the edge of the countertop behind him. Raises and lowers his shoulders. “It was good. It was no drunk lawyer party.”

“Yeah,” Kim says quietly. She glances over at a noticeboard and frowns, eyes skimming the various cards for local businesses and motivational print-outs, then looks back at him. “You’ll call if you want to run any ideas by me, right?” 

Jimmy nods. “Yeah,” he says. “‘Course I will.”

“Okay,” Kim says, after a beat. She gives him a little nod and then leaves the breakroom, heading back out to the first floor and leaving the door open behind her. 

Jimmy breathes out slowly. He runs his hand over his mouth, lips dry beneath the pads of his forefinger and thumb. Then he shakes his head and leaves the kitchenette, returning to the mail cart that waits for him haphazardly out in the hall. 

At the end of the corridor, some of the partners are speaking closely, Chuck and Howard among them. Chuck glances over and holds up a hand when he spots Jimmy, half greeting and half direction— _Wait there_. The group converses for a moment longer, several of them nodding solemnly, then Chuck nods farewell and approaches Jimmy. 

“Jimmy,” Chuck says, as he moves up beside the mail cart. “Taking a break?”

Jimmy opens his mouth to answer, but his brother is already distracted: looking through a gap between the cubicles to where Carl Vernon is standing talking to some younger associates. 

Chuck’s lips purse, then he turns back to Jimmy. “Rebecca and I are going to visit Mom for Thanksgiving,” he says. “We’re flying up on Wednesday evening.” 

Jimmy nods. “Okay,” he says. After a moment, he adds: “Yeah, sounds good. I can do that.”

Chuck nods, too, absentmindedly, then stares over at Vernon again. 

“I’m sorry about all that,” Jimmy says, waving a hand in the same direction. 

“Hm?” Chuck says. 

“You know, Vernon’s asshole client leaving the dog locked in the car.” 

“Ah,” Chuck says sharply. “Yes. Bad business.” His face twists a little, and then he straightens his cuffs and brushes some invisible lint from his jacket sleeve. “Well, we’d better get back to it, hm?” 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, and he grips the handle of the mail cart. “See you around, Chuck.” 

But Chuck’s already moving on, glancing again to Carl Vernon as he strides down the corridor, shoulders pointed and tight. Jimmy watches his brother go, then he exhales and finally resumes his mail run. 

* * *

“So what do you think?” Jimmy asks, handing Kim back her cigarette in the parking garage later that week. 

“I don’t know,” Kim says, and she raises the cigarette to her lips, then blows out the next words along with the smoke: “Are you _sure_ it has to rhyme?” 

“Kim,” Jimmy says, shaking his head. “Kim, Kim, Kim. Of course it has to rhyme.”

Kim scrunches her face at him. 

“People love rhyme!’ Jimmy says. He huffs. “Jeez, who has the marketing degree here?”

Kim flicks ash off the end of her cigarette. “Neither of us.”

“Okay, checkmate,” Jimmy says, chuckling. He leans back against the wall, palms flat on the concrete behind his back, and stares out into the darkened rows of cars. It’s cold in the garage today. The weather’s turned enough Jimmy’s started wearing long-sleeved shirts to work, but the cavernous basement seems even icier than normal, and he finds himself fidgeting, keeping his body temperature up. Shifting his weight between his feet and tapping the pads of his fingers on the rough surface. 

Beside him, he hears Kim breathe out, and he turns to face her again. 

“So considering it legally _has_ to rhyme…” he begins, “do you love it, or do you love it?” 

Kim’s eyes sparkle beneath the sharp light of the parking garage, and she shrugs. “You said you had more, what else have you got?” 

Jimmy pats his palms arrhythmically on the pockmarked concrete. “Sure, okay, tough crowd. How about, ‘We’ll Get ‘Em at HHM’?” 

“Hmm. It’s a little threatening,” Kim says mildly. “And who’s ‘them’?” 

“I don’t know,” Jimmy says, grinning. “Whoever you’re suing, I guess.” 

“Right,” Kim says, and she waves her hand. “What’s next?” 

Jimmy pulls a folded piece of yellow legal paper from his back pocket and unfurls it. “Uh…here’s one. ‘No Spills, No Frills, Just Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill’.”

“Nope.” Kim lifts her cigarette again and puffs out smoke. “Definitely not.”

“‘AM or PM, Call HHM’?” 

“Yikes,” Kim says, chuckling.

Jimmy laughs, too. “Okay, okay. That one was a reach.” He reads over his messy scrawl, the work of the past few days. “How about, ‘Hamlin Hamlin McGill: We Fit the Bill’?”

“Hmm,” Kim says thoughtfully. She takes another smoke and leans back so that her eyes dip into shadow. “That’s slightly better.” 

“Okay, great,” Jimmy says, and he pulls a pen from his shirt pocket and circles it. 

“Have you talked to Howard yet?” Kim asks lightly, tapping ash off the end of her cigarette again then holding it out to him. 

Jimmy plucks it from her fingers and takes a long drag. “Nah,” he says. He exhales smoke that glitters under the basement lights and watches it dissipate before continuing. “Every time I go up there, Julie says he’s out lunching with clients. Damage control, you think?”

Kim nods. “Try first thing tomorrow?”

“I’ll bring an overnight bag,” Jimmy says, handing Kim back the cigarette. “Blanket, maybe a camp chair. You know, stake him out.”

But it takes until Monday for Jimmy to speak with Howard. He spends the weekend scribbling in the yellow legal pad, throwing his ideas onto the page haphazardly, words like _passion_ and _integrity_ and _family_ hovering around _core values_ , buzzwords long buried that start re-emerging in his mind. It’s easy to lose himself in the work, to doodle new logo ideas and silhouettes around the paper until he’s filled sheet after sheet, until, early on Monday morning back at work, he finally spots Howard leaving his office, and manages to catch up with him on the lobby stairs. 

Howard nods politely as Jimmy speaks, then holds up a hand and says, “Tell you what, Jimmy, come and see me Thursday and we’ll see what we can do, my friend. Shall we say ten o’clock?”

“Ten o’clock, sure,” Jimmy says, and he’s left standing there as Howard gracefully continues his descent. The glow of blond hair vanishes out the front doors, and Jimmy shakes his head and chuckles to himself then turns around, heading back up to where he abandoned his mail cart mid-run after spotting the elusive younger Hamlin leaving his office. Julie nods at him when he passes, and Jimmy shoots her a thumbs up. 

For the next few days, Jimmy oscillates wildly from dumbly confident to dumbly terrified. He starts to realize that everything he knows about pitch meetings comes from movies: a man in a nice suit walking back and forth in front of a flipchart with squiggly lines and numbers on it, or slick executives dueling it out across the boardroom table. Tom Hanks playing with a transforming robot-building or Robert Duvall saying, I suppose we’ll have to kill him. Jimmy thinks briefly of buying a new suit: something single-breasted, grey flannel, ventless with three button fastening and notched lapels, because Cary Grant was an advertising man in that movie, right— 

But then he steels himself, and gets back to it, chewing the end of his pencil above yellow-lined blank pages. 

The night before the meeting, Jimmy lies on his covers with his fingers laced over his stomach, staring unseeingly at the ceiling, so awake he can’t even bear to close his eyes. His thoughts hum through his mind like electricity down a livewire, crackling, until eventually he hops out of bed and pulls his jeans back on and just heads out, boarding an empty bus and finding an all-night print shop that lets him hunker down over a table beneath harsh, flickering fluorescents for a while—cutting and pasting ideas and then photocopying them again, hand cramping from printing neat annotations beside each faux magazine ad or billboard mockup.

When he crawls back into bed, he pretends he doesn’t see the faint light of day at the edge of the sky, and he pretends the forty minutes of sleep he snatches before his alarm blares is enough. He retreads the same route to the bus stop as he walked last night, his hands tucked into his windbreaker and binder of papers beneath his arm, his shoes fast on the sidewalk as he breathes the cool morning air. 

The beep of the copy machines seems louder than usual that morning, the coffee weaker, and Jimmy spends his first few hours of work with most of his brain tucked away alongside the neat papers in his locker, mindlessly prattling to Kim and Burt and anyone who’ll listen about things that don’t matter—the weather, pizza toppings, how to ride the ‘L’ for free—his hands stained with ink as he fumbles the job of changing the printer toner and then leaves faint fingerprints behind him for the next hour. 

Until eventually he’s waiting outside the door to Howard Hamlin’s office.

Jimmy squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them. He doesn’t even need to knock. He just stands, looking at his shadow, squaring its shoulders and lifting its chin, and then Julie buzzes on the intercom, and he hears Howard’s voice through the crackly speaker: “Send him in.” 

* * *

The elevator returns to the mailroom, doors opening with a piercing trill. Jimmy lingers for a brief moment inside the cabin, his head tipped back against the wall. The wood presses hard on his skull.

It feels as if only his body has stopped descending, as if the buzz and hum of his adrenaline has continued downward past the basement level, slipping out through the soles of his feet and into the earth. He can feel his shoulders sinking into his chest like a weight’s on them. But he exhales, and pushes himself forward, and hopes the momentum will carry him out of the cabin and through the rest of the day, moving one foot in front of the other into the mailroom— 

The space is empty, the usual hum of machines absent and half the lights switched off. 

Through the open door, Jimmy can see that the breakroom is completely dark, too. Only the blinking red light of the coffee machine gives any texture to the void beyond…and then for a moment he swears he hears something in there. A shuffling noise, a gentle thud. Jimmy breathes out slowly and laughs a little to himself, then walks towards it, footsteps muffled on the carpet. 

He flicks the lights on. 

“Happy Birthday!” 

A chorus of loud voices: Burt and Henry and even, somehow, Ron, all standing around the table. Bottles of soda and a square chocolate cake sit among paper plates, cups, and an open bag of chips, and there’s a couple of leftover orange Halloween streamers hung from the kitchenette cupboards.

Jimmy laughs buoyantly, and then he feels a hand over his eyes, soft fingers on his skin, and he reaches up to touch it for a moment, then spins around. 

“Happy Birthday!” Kim says brightly, smiling broadly as she lowers her hand and grips him by the shoulders. 

“Hey,” he says, grinning at her, touching his palms to the backs of her hands lightly. “What—” 

“Happy Birthday, Jimmy!” Burt says, patting him on the back and leaning in between them. 

Kim lets go of his shoulders and raises her eyebrows at Burt. “So, who did I hear move? What happened to stealthy?” 

“You were supposed to give us the signal!” Burt says. “Where was signal, Kim? The elevator went off and I panicked, I was right by the door!” 

Kim tilts her head at him. “Oh, I _gave_ the signal,” she says dramatically. 

Burt holds his hands up innocently and walks away, only to be replaced by Henry, who’s holding out two plates of cake. 

Jimmy accepts one, and laughs again. “I don’t get it; how d’you know?” 

“It’s on the wall, Jimmy,” Henry says mildly, pointing to the corkboard in the breakroom, where a little piece of paper has all the workers’ birthdays written beside their names. “And here, hang on,” Henry says, and he goes back to the table to retrieve a little gift bag. “There’s a card in there.”

“And socks!” Jimmy says, peering in and glimpsing a pair of vibrantly-striped socks. 

“And socks,” Henry repeats. He gives Jimmy a fatherly pat on the shoulder, then hands Kim the other plate of cake and moves back to the table to get some for himself. 

Jimmy picks up his slice with his fingers and leans against the lockers to eat it. 

“So how’d it go with Howard?” Kim asks, leaning beside him. 

“Good, I think,” Jimmy says around a mouthful of cake, then he swallows it and laughs. “I don’t know. It’s a bit of a blur, to be honest.” He takes another bite, then, voice slightly muffled, says: “Felt good.”

“That’s great, Jimmy,” Kim says. 

“Yeah.” He watches Burt enthusiastically fill plastic cups with Coke, the soda bubbling and fizzing over the lip. “I just laid out all my ideas, you know?” he says. “Probably wasn’t the most conventional thing Howard’s ever seen, but hey.” He shrugs. 

Kim shrugs too, the fabric of her shirt shifting against his shoulder. “I bet you sold him,” she says softly, and then, after a moment, in her normal tone: “Some of those rhymes were pretty convincing…” 

Jimmy chuckles. “All right, stop it.” 

“What was it, uh…” Kim taps her lips. “‘Say It Again, We’re HHM’?” 

“Wow, Kim, you had that up your sleeve the whole time and you didn’t tell me?” Jimmy says. “That definitely would’ve cinched it.”

“What can I say? It’s my cheerleader roots,” Kim says dryly. 

Jimmy twists to face her, his eyes wide, but Kim just gives him a withering look, and he snorts. Burt brings them each a cup of Coke, and Jimmy drinks his slowly, the bubbles tingling down his throat and into his stomach. He tips his head back again and closes his eyes, and it feels like his body is drifting, his blood slow and lifeless beneath his skin. 

“You look half dead,” Kim murmurs, and he opens his eyes to squint at her. “Maybe even eighty per cent,” she adds, raising her eyebrows. “Pushing ninety.” 

Jimmy shrugs. “I’m okay. I’ll get through.” 

Kim’s mouth is tight at the edges. “You up for something after work, though?” she asks quietly. 

“Yeah, ‘course!” he says brightly. 

Kim’s expression relaxes. “Okay,” she says.

A smile grows on his face. “Do I get to know what?”

“Nope,” Kim says crisply, and she pushes off from the lockers and wanders away. Jimmy laughs after her, and she turns around to face him, walking backwards and calling, “So, do you want another coffee, or what?” 

* * *

A blast of hot air from the air-con in Kim’s car hits Jimmy and he yawns, holding a fist in front of his mouth. They’re idling in the parking garage of HHM, headlights spilling across the concrete to where other cars are pulling out of their spots and leaving the office for the day.

“You sure you’re up for this?” Kim asks, hands on the wheel. 

Jimmy nods through a second yawn, then chuckles. “Yeah,” he says, and when Kim frowns he adds, “I’m good, Kim. Besides, it’s either this or sit at home and watch the new _Wings_.” 

“Wow, you think you could make it through a full episode, huh?” 

“What can I say, I’m hooked.”

“Well, all right then,” Kim says, and she reverses out of her space and drives out of the building.

It’s gone six and the sky's already almost dark. Jimmy watches the familiar buildings go by, scratching his cheek idly. The sidewalks are empty, and all the restaurants have their doors closed, warm yellow shining invitingly within.

They draw to a stop at a set of lights, and the traffic flashes past before them. “We’re not fleeing into the night again, are we?” he asks, watching the blur of headlights.

Kim turns to him, eyes softening into a look that seems to silently say, Would you? 

He shrugs. Of course he would, he thinks. 

But—“Keeping it in Albuquerque for tonight,” Kim murmurs instead. 

“I can live with that,” Jimmy says, nodding. "Yeah," he adds quietly. "Sounds good."

The traffic light shifts to green and they drive on, slow with the busy evening traffic for a couple more blocks, until Kim turns off the road and pulls up outside a liquor store. 

“Okay, hang on,” Jimmy asks, leaning forward to peer around as if there’s something he’s missing. “You getting me drunk?”

“I’ll be three secs,” Kim says, turning off the ignition. “Wait here.” She hops out of the car, leaving him alone.

Jimmy watches her vanish through the doors to the store then breathes out. He studies an old man hobbling along the sidewalk for a while, and then his eyes are drawn between his feet to where his birthday gift bag from earlier rests. It’s now filled not only with the socks and the card from the mailroom staff, but also some napkin-wrapped slices of cake and another envelope—white, and unaddressed. Jimmy pulls this last out and runs his thumb over the seal. He exhales. 

A minute later, Kim comes back with a six pack of Shiner Bock. She tucks it over into the back seat, then faces him. “What’s that?” she asks, looking at the envelope in his hand. 

“It's from Chuck,” Jimmy says, turning it over. His brother had handed it to him in the corridor that afternoon, with a murmured greeting and a pat on the shoulder. At Kim’s raised eyebrows, Jimmy goes for it, sliding his fingernail under the seal and tearing it, then slipping out a card. The stock is heavy, expensive, and three colorful balloons are printed on the front. 

“Cute,” Kim says. 

Jimmy laughs lightly. He opens the card. _Happy Birthday Jimmy,_ says his brother’s familiar neat cursive. _All the best for the coming year._ “Hah,” Jimmy says, smiling. “That’s nice.”

Kim looks at him thoughtfully. 

“It’s been a while, you know?” Jimmy says. 

Kim’s face grows soft, and she gives him a small smile. 

“He wasn’t usually home for my birthday,” Jimmy says, and he gestures with card. “But he always sent something. Not that they’ve ever been great novels, but that’s Chuck for you, right?” He huffs out a breath, smiling, his stomach tight. “Man of few words.”

Kim nods, but doesn’t say anything. 

Jimmy slides the card back into the envelope and puts it back in the gift bag, then tucks it safely back between his feet as Kim drives on, heading out onto the main road and towards downtown. They talk idly for while, Kim venting about the law student she’s been paired with this week, and then Jimmy notices her glance at the dashboard clock for the third time in as many minutes. 

“We late for something?” he asks, lifting an eyebrow. 

“No,” Kim says, just as she flicks on her indicator. They pull off the road into drive-thru.

Jimmy glances up at a sign then back at Kim. “We late for Lotaburger?”

Kim shushes him. “Jimmy. D’you want anything, or not?”

“Of course,” Jimmy says, and they order. He watches Kim as she speaks into the intercom and smiles, and Kim flashes her eyes at him enigmatically when she's finished.

They make their slow way through the drive-thru. He taps his palms on the seat lightly until Kim takes their burgers from the woman in the window, and twists around to put the bag over on the backseat near the six-pack of beers. 

“Beers and burgers,” Jimmy muses, staring back at them. “What’s the plan here, Kim? We gonna drive up to the make-out point in the woods? Get attacked by some vampires? Get attacked by the Blob?” 

Kim chuckles. “Just be patient.”

“All right, all right,” Jimmy says, nestling deeper into the seat. “Wake me when we’re there, okay?” 

But he doesn’t close his eyes. He watches the yellow-lit buildings drift past the window, curved and earthen, winking fondly at him through half-open blinds. Kim drives on steadily, crossing over the river, over the lights of houses reflected in the slow-moving water, past the trees on the banks that are shadowed in dusk. The suburbs beyond the Rio Grande are quiet, the traffic thin, and Jimmy hums a little under his breath as they pass half-filled restaurants and closed shops, the roads wide and flat. 

And then eventually the car slows for a final time before a bright red sign that reads, _Sunset Drive-In._ It's old but illuminated, and Jimmy grins at the sight of it. Beneath it in smaller uneven black letters are the words, _Cool Hand Luke,_ the final 'e' spaced awkwardly far from the 'k'. Kim peels off the road beside the sign, and car hums over the dirt driveway leading up to the theater. They pull through the ticket gate, not speaking yet except to the attendant inside, Kim following the signs and coming to a stop amid a scattering of other cars. An enormous white screen waits before them, empty. 

“Okay,” Jimmy says, finally, nodding. “I can get behind this.” 

“Good,” Kim says, laughing a little. “Because you know I already paid the man at the gate.” 

Jimmy chuckles, and he takes the bag of burgers and the six-pack of Shiner as Kim pass them over to him. He fishes for his keys and pops the caps off two bottles then sets them in the cup holders.

Kim’s still rifling for something, twisted completely around, fishing through the seat pocket behind the driver's seat. When she turns back, she’s holding another paper bag, this one misshapen and lumpy. 

Jimmy takes a sip of beer and widens his eyes expectantly. 

After a beat, Kim holds it out to him, and says, “It’s no stolen library book, but…” 

“Oho,” Jimmy says, grinning, and he sets his bottle down and takes the paper bag from her. Whatever’s inside clinks, and he unfurls the top and pulls out…two shot glasses. A familiar skyline is etched into them, and above it in orange, the words, _Chicago_. Jimmy bursts out laughing. “Oh my god,” he says, glancing to Kim, “did you get these at that travel center?” 

Kim nods, chuckling along with him. “Yep. Nestled in between the Amsterdam and Sydney glasses.” 

“Wow,” Jimmy says softly. “That place really had everything.” He turns one around in his hand, hiding and revealing the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center, then he looks back up at her. 

Kim smiles. “Happy Birthday, Jimmy.”

He sets the two shot glasses beside each other on the dashboard, then grins at her. “Thanks.” 

“You know, I almost got you a poncho,” Kim says lightly. 

Jimmy laughs and holds up his hands. “Hey, I wouldn’t say no to a poncho. Get one in red and blue stripes, match my new socks.” 

Kim snorts, and then the theater screen flashes. A Bacardi ad starts rolling, bright tropical colors. Kim rolls down her window and grabs the speaker box from the stand beside the car, clipping it inside just in time for them to hear the smooth jazz of the advertisement, and Jimmy finally digs around for the burgers and fries, passing Kim’s over to her. He unwraps his burger, and the two of them eat, chatting a little as more advertisements play.

Then the screen goes black, and they watch together while Paul Newman drunkenly dismantles parking meters, completely silently, just like them.

As the film runs, Kim slips off her shoes and sits cross-legged in her seat, leaning back, smile playing on her face. She cradles her beer, holding the neck with her left hand, rocking it back and forth slightly on her knee.

Jimmy rubs his thumb over the label of his own bottle and takes a sip, settling in, leaning his head back against the headrest. It’s been a long time since he’s watched this movie, and it’s more beautiful than he remembers: bright blues and yellows and enormous fields.

The nostalgic twang of the soundtrack plays over the chain gang. He tries to remember when exactly he last watched it. With Marco, probably, round Marco’s dad’s place, rented with ten other films from the local Blockbuster that weekend. He can remember arguing with Marco as they watched—they were each sure they could eat fifty eggs, and each sure the other definitely couldn’t. Jimmy gives a soft little laugh that has nothing to do with what’s happening on screen, and Kim glances over at him. He smiles, and she returns it, before looking back at the film. 

It’s quiet in the car, and Jimmy's seat is soft, and there’s a pleasant warmth settling over him. He feels all the tiredness of the day pressing like fingers on the back of his eyes—but there’s something comforting about it. Like nights as a kid, out somewhere he shouldn't be, alive with the lateness of it. 

Some time into the film, Jimmy looks over at Kim. Maybe she makes a noise, or moves, or maybe he just feels compelled to _look_ , because he finds himself turning at her as the sound of banjo strings emerges from the silvery speaker inside the car. Her gaze is fixed on the screen, and her eyes are shining, mirrored lakes.

If this were a novel he’d say he could see the reflection of the movie in them: Paul Newman sitting on his bunk, strumming his banjo and singing ‘Plastic Jesus’.

He can't. He can only see the dark pools of her eyes.

She doesn’t move at all, and her gaze doesn’t falter, but somehow Jimmy knows that Kim can feel him looking at her. The blue-white light of the prison dormitory shadows her face, and her eyes glimmer, and he doesn’t look away, and Kim doesn’t look to him.

He just watches her, and she watches the film—so still.


	13. Cicero, Illinois

O’Hare is swarming with travelers as Jimmy weaves his way down the terminal concourse, duffel bag over one shoulder, dodging frantic families who rush to and from flights beneath the curved glass ceiling. He passes the baggage carousels, and the dead-eyed travelers who wait before them, and the cab drivers with their lettered signs, until eventually he emerges from the airport. 

It’s early Wednesday evening and already dark, and, as Jimmy waits at the taxi rank, he draws his jacket tighter around himself—the heavy leather jacket it’s never quite gotten cold enough in Albuquerque for him to wear. Little kids bundled up in scarves and knit hats bounce on the sidewalk or spin with mittened hands around the pole of a ‘No Parking’ sign. 

Jimmy’s breath ghosts in front of him, crystal vapor. He tucks his palms beneath his armpits and rocks on the balls of his feet, watching yellow cabs cruise slowly along the bay, picking up travelers and then peeling off, roof lights now dark. He feels like everything around him should be more familiar than it is, but the truth is that he hasn’t flown into Chicago very often, and, if he has waited outside this specific terminal before, he can’t remember it. 

Eventually, he slides into the warm interior of a cab. He gives his mother’s address then settles down in the backseat, staring out his window at the industrial buildings surrounding the airport freeway and the other cars flashing past in the lane beside them. The taxi driver has the radio on low, top forty songs playing just outside of Jimmy’s hearing. 

For the longest time, Jimmy had thought that returning to Chicago would make Albuquerque feel like a dream. Instead, the world out his window seems the dreamlike one, viewed for the first time through eyes that have become accustomed to the shape of other things. 

But what strikes him the most, as now rooftops and housing blocks begin to drift lazily through his view, is how this place actually feels like a city. Unlike Albuquerque, where no matter where he went it had always seemed as if the open desert was just _there_ , just behind the next row of buildings, desolate and empty and waiting. Here, he can tell the streets stretch on forever: mile after mile of marked-out grids, of districts and suburbs, of urban sprawl. 

Here, the city has won against the land. 

Jimmy wonders what it would be like to grow up in a place where you can walk from one end of the town to the other, where you can know the name of every street and recognize everyone you see. 

The taxi turns off the freeway, and they slow, driving beneath train tracks, passing red-brick buildings and scrap yards, wild green growth that climbs the fences and curbs. Jimmy feels a smile dawn on his face as it all unfolds before him: empty lots filled with tousled grass, late-night bars and squat manufacturing plants, roads he’s driven on and walked down thousands of times before—Cicero. 

It’s so familiar his stomach aches for it. 

But then, of course, just as he finishes that thought, the taxi approaches something else. The jagged scar on the district. The space that, until a few years ago, had been filled by the Hawthorne Works—the enormous Western Electric factory, the city within the city. One time colossal, spanning blocks, employing tens of thousands of workers, now nothing. 

And Jimmy suddenly realizes that he had rebuilt the factory in his memory while he was gone, had restored the enormous tower to the corner of Cicero and Cermak where it had once risen to a dark-tiled point above the colossal red-brick buildings. The guidepost he had once used to navigate, the beacon that had meant he was almost home. 

Now there’s only a strip mall. He watches it go by, the area huge and empty. A gap in space. 

The taxi leaves the main road and cuts in between side roads until the driver hangs a right into his mother’s street—Jimmy’s street. 

And Jimmy leans forward, peering through the windscreen as they approach. “Just up here is fine,” he says after a moment, and the driver pulls to a stop. Jimmy pays the fare and steps out, shouldering his duffel bag again. He exhales in puffs of glowing vapor. 

The streetlamps here are muffled and yellow, hazing at the edges. They line a street of narrow houses, built for height, with thin yards and pointed rooftops. The architecture is mismatched: some houses brick, others not, some with small porches and others with front garages. Tall trees, old and curling, rise from the grass parkway. 

His mother’s house is white weatherboard with a steep roof and a dark blue door atop a narrow stoop. Out a square window on the second story shines an orange light, diffuse through lace curtains. 

Jimmy huffs again, ice-breathed. The neighbors two doors down have cut their hedges way back, and their house looks strange and exposed, but all else seems unchanged from his childhood. He revels in the familiar closeness of everything: of walls and front doors and fences. If he squints, he can almost see Marco’s uncle’s old place, all the way at the end of the block. 

There’s a soft rumble of a train passing on the tracks that sprawl behind the backyards of the houses opposite his mother’s. Then the muted, breathy sound of a whistle blowing. 

Jimmy cups his hands and exhales into them hollowly. He rubs his palms together. Beyond the continued hum of the train engine, he almost thinks he can hear voices from the house before him, loud and vibrant in conversation. He crouches, unzips his bag and pulls out a bottle of wine wrapped in cellophane, then closes the bag and stands with it slung against his hip. 

He walks down the garden path and up the stoop and knocks on the front door of his childhood home. 

* * *

“Jimmy,” Chuck says, standing in the threshold, the door pulled back. He’s still in a suit, though his tie is loosened and his top button undone. “You made it.”

“I almost got stampeded at the airport, but—yeah,” Jimmy says, wiping his feet and stepping over the threshold. He sets his duffel down in the entryway, inhaling the familiar smell of the house, washing powder and dust. It’s warm inside, and the heat hits him like a wall. He rubs his hands up and down his arms, getting the circulation going, then looks around. “Where’s Mom?”

“Living room,” Chuck says, holding his hands out for Jimmy’s jacket. 

Jimmy shrugs out of it and lets Chuck take it. “How long’ve you been here?” he asks. 

“—is that Jimmy?” his mother’s voice calls, distant. 

“—about a half hour,” Chuck says, waving a hand. “Just getting settled in.”

“Hiya, Mom!” Jimmy calls back toward the living room, slipping off his shoes and grinning at Chuck. “So how about you? Good flight?”

Chuck closes his eyes briefly. “We sat on the tarmac for an hour,” he says. 

“Oh no,” Jimmy says, just as a jingling bell sounds, and a little speckled cat trots around a corner. He crouches down and scritches behinds Delilah’s ears. “Hello, old buddy.”

Delilah presses her head up into his hand, trying to rub her cheek on his fingers. 

“Aw, yeah, I missed you too,” Jimmy murmurs. 

With a shuffle of footsteps, his mother appears at the end of the hallway. Jimmy’s chest tightens at the sight of her, and suddenly he regrets letting Chuck convince him to go straight to Albuquerque all those months ago, because she looks so much older than he remembers—though it can’t have been more than a couple of years since he last saw her in person.

And like a stone sinking in his gut, he’s hit with the realization of all the time he spent hiding, the last five-going-on-six years, avoiding his mother in the same city as her, less than half an hour away. 

So he stays where he is in the entryway, crouched and frozen, for longer than he should, as she approaches. 

Until—“Mom,” he says, forcing himself to his feet. 

Ruth smiles, reaching for him and gripping his upper arms. She looks him over assessingly. “I like this,” she says, brushing his bangs lightly, then she squeezes his arms and then releases him. “You look good.”

“So do you,” Jimmy says warmly. His mother goes to step away but he holds his arms out, and she moves into them. She smells of unplaceable things—familiar and intangible, like mornings. 

Ruth rubs him on his back and then moves away again. “Come, come,” she says, reaching for Jimmy’s bag, but he grabs it himself and shoulders it again. She beckons for him to follow her into the family room through an open arch off the entryway. “We’ve put Rebecca’s mother in your old room, so you’ll be down here, if that’s all right…” 

Jimmy hums in agreement, dropping his bag beside the foldout sofa. A set of sheets and a comforter rest on it tidily. “Betty’s here?” he asks. 

His mother nods, and she straightens a folded blanket. Smooths out the wool with the palm of her hand. “There’s more blankets in the closet upstairs if you get cold later,” she says. 

Jimmy nods. 

“But of course you knew that,” Ruth says softly. 

“Right,” he says. He glances around at the old television, the cabinet of dusty video tapes. The striped wallpaper that hasn’t changed since he was a kid. The shuttered window to the front yard. Then back to his mother, who hovers beside the foldout couch. “This is good,” he adds. “Thank you.”

Ruth shakes her head. “It’s a bit shabby in here—”

“No, it’s good,” Jimmy says. He gives a little laugh. “Reminds me of when Grammy and Pop and the cousins would be over, and me and Chuck would have to sleep in here…”

Ruth chuckles lightly. “I think you two drove each other a little bit crazy, those times.”

“Yeah, well,” Jimmy says, shrugging. “Of course.”

Ruth gives the folded blanket another light pat. Then she nods, and leads him back through to the entryway and down the main hallway. A new stair lift has been installed on the stairs up to the second floor. 

His mother sighs beside him, slowing to a stop. “I really should get that removed,” she says. “I can make it up there on my own again now.”

Jimmy’s gaze flicks unconsciously down at her knee, hidden beneath a long skirt, then back to the stair lift. 

“Ugly thing,” Ruth adds. “Governments have moved faster than it.” 

Chuck appears through the doorway to the kitchen, an apron now over his suit. “Best to play it safe though, Mom. You never know when you might need it again.” 

“Honey, I had the operation so I could be more active, not the other way around,” Ruth says mildly. 

But Chuck just shakes his head. “Listen, are you drinking, Mom? Do you want wine with dinner?” 

“Oh! I brought some,” Jimmy says, glancing around: at his empty hands, back down the hallway into the entryway. His jacket is hanging on a hook, but no sign of the cellophane-wrapped wine. 

“I put it in the pantry,” Chuck says, after a moment. 

“Thank you for bringing it, Jimmy,” Ruth says, touching him lightly on the arm. “And yes, I think I’ll have a glass.”

Chuck inclines his head. “Jimmy?”

“Uh, sure,” Jimmy says, and he follows the two of them through into the open plan kitchen and dining area. 

Rebecca is standing at the kitchen counter halving cherry tomatoes, she looks up at their entrance. “Hello, Jimmy,” she says, wiping her hands on a dish towel and moving around to their side. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too,” Jimmy says, as she gives him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. He takes in the kitchen, the chopping boards covered with vegetables, the salad spinner in the sink beneath the familiar orange 70’s tile. “Can I help with anything?” 

“That’s okay,” Chuck says, moving past the counter. He lifts the lid on a pot of boiling water.

“I think we’re just about set; thank you, Jimmy,” Rebecca adds. “I made the pesto ahead of time so there’s really not much left to do, just throw it together with the pasta. It was one of our favorites on our trip last year, and so simple!” She turns to look at Chuck, who nods. 

“And Mom’s not lifting a finger, either. Right, Mom?” Chuck says. 

Ruth waves a dismissive hand. 

Old Bing Crosby music is coming from the living room, and Jimmy spots the white-haired head of Rebecca’s mother bent over the record collection beside the stereo. He wanders past the dining table, already set with five places, toward the sound of the music, stepping around armchairs and approaching the old woman. “Good old Bing, huh?” he says, when he reaches her. 

Betty looks up from the records and smiles. “I thought that was James I heard.” She bustles over and wraps him in a tight, lavender-scented hug. 

“You know, I seem to remember telling you to call me Jimmy,” he says wryly, after she’s released him. 

Betty whacks him lightly on the shoulder and returns to the records, flicking through them and humming to herself out-of-time with ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. 

Dusty old photographs are arranged in wooden frames on the cabinet beside the stereo. Pictures of his parents on their wedding day, of the extended family, of his mother and her bridge club friends. 

There’s a line of photos of Chuck at graduation ceremonies, wearing different colored gowns, though his brother’s expression is the same in each: smiling gently on mottled grey backgrounds. Chuck has always looked so much older to Jimmy, has always served as the marker of a grown adult, whether fourteen or forty; but looking at these graduation photos, his brother’s hair thick and blond and preppily parted, it suddenly strikes Jimmy how _young_ Chuck is in most of them. Just a child, really—though with the kind of driving gaze that even through twenty years and picture-frame glass can convince you he’s host to all the wisdom of the world. 

His father looks young, too, but in the way that people in black and white photographs look young—still aged somehow, still old at the edges. Charles McGill Sr. waves to the camera from the passenger seat of a car, his hand blurred; and, for the first time, something in his expression reminds Jimmy of Chuck, something in the lines around his eyes or his nose. Beside him, leaning against the open passenger door, is Jimmy’s mother, vibrantly frozen in a summer dress. 

Jimmy further moves along the cabinet.

More than anyone else, there’s photos of himself. A small one of him and Marco, maybe eight years old, smiling cheekily at each other, hands stained with paint. Another of him on a new bicycle. One of him perched on a stool behind the counter at the store.

At his oldest in these photos, Jimmy is fifteen, still in high school, smiling up at the camera from where he sits cross-legged on the floor. He’s surrounded by wrapping paper, his hair almost down to his shoulders. It’s the only picture where he’s looking directly at the lens, and Jimmy picks it up absent-mindedly, staring into his own eyes. 

“Reliving the glory days?” Betty asks, moving beside him and looking down at the frame. 

Jimmy gives a light chuckle. “I just always liked that shirt,” he says, pointing to the old _Blazing Saddles_ t-shirt he’s wearing in the photograph. 

“A relic,” Betty says. She drifts along the photos now herself, briefly adjusting one of Chuck and Rebecca on their wedding day, then one of Jimmy running along a beach. “You’re very cute in these.”

“Hah,” Jimmy says. “Thanks.”

“All gone now, of course, dear,” Betty says, stopping her perusal at a photograph of Jimmy reading a comic book in his bedroom. She turns to him. “Thank you for letting me use your old room. If you want to look through your things, you’re more than welcome. Just barge in, don’t mind me.”

Jimmy shakes his head. “No, that’s all right.” He sets down the photo of himself. “I hope Mom’s binned most of it by now, anyway.” 

Betty raises her eyebrows coyly. “I suppose you’ll have to open the door to find out.”

“Dinner!” Chuck calls then, and Jimmy turns back to see his brother walking out of the kitchen with an enormous dish of pasta. 

Rebecca follows him with a bowl of salad in one hand and a bottle of white wine in the other. 

“Now, we couldn’t find authentic parmesan on our way here,” Chuck says as they all wander over and get settled. “But there’s the processed stuff if, ah—required.” He sets a small can of the cheese down on the table and takes a seat at the end opposite Ruth, shuffling his chair inward. 

“We brought this bottle back from our trip to Italy,” Rebecca says as she twists a corkscrew into the wine. “I thought it might be nice to have something special tonight, too.” She pops the cork and pours out the glasses. 

Chuck passes down the bowl of pasta, and Jimmy serves himself some, then holds it for his mother, who smiles at him gently. She doesn’t talk much over dinner, but she listens, and the same gentle smile lingers on her face as Rebecca and Betty trade off recounting their earlier flight delays, and Chuck talks about one of his cases, and Jimmy cracks jokes about Albuquerque. 

That night, they watch one of the _Thin Man_ movies—the one with Jimmy Stewart. It’s wonderfully nostalgic, and Jimmy laughs at it louder than he normally would, reveling in Nick and Nora Charles. His mother looks tired on the sofa beside him, but she’s the only other one really paying attention to the film. Chuck is reading over some case files he’s brought with him, making notes on a legal pad, and Rebecca and her mother are talking between themselves over deck of cards, though Jimmy can’t tell what game they’re playing.

Jimmy folds his legs up under him and leans his palm on his hand, sinking into the warmth of the living room. 

“I remembered the name of that film,” Ruth says softly at one point, and Jimmy turns to make sure she’s talking to him.

At her silence, he says, “Film?” 

“The one with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy,” she says, pointing to Loy playing with the little white dog. “I saw it playing again the other night, and I remembered it so I could tell you. It was _The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.”_

“Huh,” Jimmy says quietly. He taps his fingers on his cheek. “That’s not a very good title.” 

Ruth hums. “I suppose it makes more sense if you know what a bobby-soxer is.” 

He raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?” he prompts. “And?”

His mother shrugs. “Well, I imagine it’s someone who wears bobby socks.”

Jimmy laughs lightly, and his mother joins in—soft and musical. Chuck glances up at the two of them and frowns, then returns to his notes, pen scratching on the paper. 

Nick and Nora banter on the television, and their little white dog runs laps around them. Jimmy watches the film until the credits roll and everyone heads upstairs for the night, leaving the downstairs quiet and darkened.

He flicks through the channels for a little while, lingering on a made-for-TV movie for a few minutes, but then he clicks the set off. Moves to the kitchen and fills a glass at the sink and then stands there, looking through into the living room, where the light from the streetlamps outside shines through the curtains. 

In the distance, a train passes. 

Jimmy makes up his bed on the fold-out sofa and falls asleep the way he used to when he was a kid, counting the vine-leaves on the cornice until his eyelids grow too heavy and he slips away. 

* * *

Jimmy wakes up at dawn the next morning, his body used to the schedule of the mailroom. He lies on the fold-out sofa for a few minutes, warm under the blankets, and then slips out from the covers and pulls on a pair of jeans. He moves on sock-padded feet to the kitchen and brews a pot of coffee, fumbling with cold hands to put in the filter. 

As he waits, the coffee dripping slowly, he opens all the curtains and blinds, letting the half-light of morning into the house. Frost covers the grass out in the backyard and dusts the leaves of the trees. Though the sun has risen, a soft moon still hangs in the sky. 

Jimmy wanders up to the ranch-slider and stands before it, letting his breath fog the glass. He remembers running through their yard when he was a kid, throwing baseballs with Marco, though it seems much smaller now. At the rear, the garage is closed up and white-roofed, his mother’s old Volvo no doubt still tucked away inside. Behind it, unseen, runs the back alley where he would ride his bike when he was younger and smoke when he was older. 

Eventually, he hears movement upstairs, and first Betty and then the others join him. Jimmy drinks his coffee at the table quietly, listening to the others. 

As the frost melts on the grass, the house fills with activity. Chuck and Rebecca launch into food preparation in the kitchen. Jimmy tries to help where he can, but there’s not much he can do—other than walking to the store for some more butter and milk when they suddenly realize they don’t have enough. 

On his way back, he hears the sound of people playing backyard football: laughter and shouting and the thud of the ball. Jimmy stops for a moment to listen, plastic bag gripped in one hand, his nose burning with the cold. The houses either side of the one he lingers outside are boarded up, heading for foreclosure, like many of the other houses along the street. He doesn’t look at those too closely as he walks home. 

By the time he gets back and hands Rebecca his shopping bag, the Macy’s Parade has started. Jimmy sits with his mother and Betty in the living room and watches the enormous balloons drift down New York streets. Betty, who it turns out has always secretly wanted to be a Broadway star, keeps up a running commentary on all the special guests: little orphan Annie and men in double-breasted suits tap-dancing on tables. 

Eventually, the house fills with the smell of roasting turkey, and Jimmy doesn’t even want to think about how long it’s been since he’s had a proper Thanksgiving meal. As the new Goofy balloon coasts through Times Square, he keeps darting glances into the kitchen, where Chuck and Rebecca are talking sharply to each other and running over a sheet of paper like a battle plan. Every half hour or so, Chuck opens the oven to baste the turkey, and another wave of the incredible scent will carry through to the living room. 

“Oh, I sang this one once,” Betty says, as the camera cuts from Willard Scott and Katie Couric to a woman performing ‘Sorry Her Lot’. She hums the tune along with the actress on the screen, then adds, “The school paper called me radiant.”

“The school paper?” Rebecca calls from the kitchen. “Dad wrote that, Mom.” 

“Well, shush,” Betty says, but she’s smiling. 

They fall silent again, watching the parade. Eventually, Rebecca comes to sit with them for a little while too, dropping down on the couch next to her mother and letting out a long sigh.

“Thank you so much for taking care of all this, sweetie,” Betty says. “It makes a nice change.”

“Right, Mom,” Rebecca says indulgently. She rubs the back of her neck and glances over Jimmy. “A nice change from already being three wines deep into a game of gin rummy with Joshua.” She chuckles. “Well, he’s gone to Aspen with Maggie so you have nobody left to torture.” 

Betty opens her mouth in mock protest. 

“You know, I think we still have some of our old board games around,” Ruth says mildly. 

“Uh oh,” Rebecca murmurs. 

“They’ll be in a cupboard upstairs somewhere,” Ruth says, and she begins to rise to her feet. 

“No, I’ll get them,” Jimmy says, waving her down. He picks up a couple of their empty coffee cups and carries them to the kitchen, where Chuck is frowning intensely at the oven as if it’s on the witness stand. “Turkey coming along?” Jimmy asks, putting the mugs down in the sink. 

Chuck starts a little and turns to face him. “Oh, hi, Jimmy,” he says. “Sorry, did you need something?” 

Jimmy laughs lightly. “No, no, I’m all set.” He heads out of the kitchen again, patting Chuck on the shoulder as he passes. “Good luck!”

The old boards creak beneath his feet as he climbs the staircase to the second floor, passing framed photographs of old vacations on the landing. He tries the cupboard in the hallway first, but of course it’s just filled with linen, and he knows the cupboard in Chuck’s old room will still be crammed with boxes of his father’s things. 

So he pushes open the door to his own room. It’s been tidied out a lot over the years, and his posters are long gone off the walls, though in some places, impossibly, ghosts of them still remain: the faint outline of his _The Getaway_ poster where the sun once struck the wallpaper.

Out the window, shadowed, he can see the neighbor’s place, their lights off. It doesn’t look like there’s anybody living there now, and he can see down into the empty rooms: the bare skirting-board and open doorways. Certainly no sign of the girl who once lived there when he was a kid, who he’d climb fences with in summer, and throw snowballs into cars with over the holidays. 

He steps back from the window. Betty’s suitcase sits beneath the sill, and the bed is made up much neater than he would have ever left it, the covers tucked beneath the mattress. 

But, despite it all, the room is still unmistakably _his_ —just as Chuck’s room remained unmistakably _Chuck’s_ for all the years that Jimmy lived in this house, even though Chuck himself wasn’t there for most of them. There was always something of his brother that lingered in the space, even when it became ostensibly the guest bedroom, and Jimmy doesn’t need to look inside it to know that the bookshelves will still carry Chuck’s school textbooks, will still carry his animal encyclopedias, the spines fading into obscurity. 

Jimmy opens his closet. It’s mostly filled with boxes of his mother’s craft supplies now. Atop them are stacks of old paperbacks, the pages curling. Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut. Jimmy picks up _The Breakfast of Champions_ and flicks through it, the illustrations flashing past, and then he returns it to the pile. 

And beneath the books he sees another stack: dark bound journals, ragged at the edges. He slips one out and lets it fall open. Pages of old doodles greet him: cartoonish, exaggerated drawings of kids he went to school with, or old men and women he recognizes from the diner where he and Marco used to get milkshakes. Some are paired with sarcastic commentary, others are slightly more serious, legitimate attempts at sketches. Dirty Harry in his tweed jacket and red sweater pointing a gun off the page. 

Jimmy slides out another journal from a different place in the stack. He must have been younger when he filled up this one, because the doodles are cruder and at times unintelligible; but, grinning to himself, he stops at one that’s still recognizably Chuck, in a striped sweater, with hair swept neatly to one side. Jimmy leaves the page open on the top of the jumbled pile, and pulls out another from the stack. 

And in this next journal, the balance shifts towards writing, spiked capital letters detailing his day or dreams or weaving his initials with other people’s. He finds Claire’s name matched with his own multiple times, or traced on imaginary album covers, years before the two of them got hastily married in Vegas—and he’d almost forgotten the teenage years he’d spent dopily pining for her, had let the last few months of their relationship color his memories of the entire thing. Leaf after leaf of initials and sketches… 

He turns another page and a loose wad of cash tumbles to the carpet, furling open over the worn fibers like a fan. 

Jimmy kneels. It’s singles and fives, mostly, but there’s a couple of twenties. He gathers the cash, spreading it out over the pages of the journal. More than fifty dollars all up. 

And he knows without question that he’s looking at money from his father’s store, stolen from the till and stashed here and then forgotten about, left here folded between— 

He snaps the journal shut. 

Noises rise from the kitchen downstairs. The sound of silverware and the slam of the oven door closing. Jimmy pushes himself to his feet. He quickly shoves the journal he’s holding back into the stack, then stretches up to the top shelf of the cupboard and grabs a random pile of board games. 

Something inside one of the boxes rattles as he walks back downstairs to the others. He lingers in the threshold of the hallway, watching Chuck and Rebecca work in the kitchen and his mother and Betty chat to each other at the dining table. 

Eventually, Rebecca spots him. “Hey, Jimmy, food’s just about up,” she says, slipping on an oven mitt and removing a casserole dish from the oven. 

Jimmy nods. He wanders to the living room and sets the board games down on the coffee table, then heads back to the dining table, where his mother and Betty are already seated at one end. Chuck carves up the turkey, and Rebecca brings over the rest of the food, and soon they’re all loading up their plates, and it’s like flashing back to a long time ago, settling down to eat at all the tables of his childhood. 

* * *

“But we managed in the end, didn’t we? Caught the overnight train and found a place that would take us…pouring with rain…” Chuck says, rolling his eyes. 

“It was very biblical,” Rebecca adds. 

Jimmy sips his beer. His plate is almost empty, but he spears a bit of turkey with his fork and swipes it through the cranberry sauce and pops it into his mouth. The cranberry sauce—a reluctant addition to the table, as Chuck and Rebecca have gone for Tuscan-inspired versions instead of the usual fare, almost everything prompting lengthy recollections from the two as they relive their trip to Italy. From the expressions on Betty and his mother’s faces, it’s not the first time they’ve been told most of the stories, but they’re new to Jimmy, at least.

He scoops up some of the butternut squash polenta that’s serving as the mashed potato and eats it, then says, “So you’re gonna go back there, right?”

Rebecca nods. “Hopefully.”

“It depends on Rebecca’s commitments,” Chuck says. “And, of course, if things keep going as they are, I’m going to be busy for a while, too. Now I know you’re sick of hearing about it—” to Rebecca, holding his hands up apologetically “—but it’s really paying dividends for the company. That Amendola case made big waves. We might be on our way to becoming the go-to firm for anti-trust suits.” 

“That’s wonderful honey,” Ruth says. 

“Chuck was quite the hero, to hear him tell it,” Rebecca adds. 

Chuck smiles effacingly. “Well, I’m sure the others would have handled it fine enough by themselves, but to get it thrown out in summary judgement…” He tilts his head. “Saved a lot of heartache, I can tell you that.” 

Jimmy makes an impressed noise around his mouthful of turkey, but though he vaguely recognizes the name Amendola he has no real idea what his brother’s talking about. 

“And what about you, Jimmy?” Betty asks, turning to him. “How’s HHM?” 

“Oh, well…” He swallows. “Yeah, real good. I mean no—” he waves a hand at Chuck “—no heroism from me yet, but it’s good.”

“Give it time,” Rebecca says. 

Jimmy laughs lightly. He leans forward to pile some more turkey on his plate, then settles back and glances around at the others. “Well, I’ve actually been looking into getting out of the mailroom, too—not that I don’t like it there!” He holds his palms up to Chuck. “Nicest people you could ever meet, and you know I appreciate it. But a guy can’t lick stamps forever, right?” 

“I thought there was a sponge for that,” Chuck says dryly. 

Jimmy smiles. “Right, yeah. Anyway, so I’ve just been dipping my toe in the water, you know. They let me pitch some marketing ideas, actually.” He doesn’t look at his mother. “So I’m still waiting to hear back about that.” 

“Really, Jimmy? That’s wonderful,” Rebecca says. 

He slices up some turkey and pops it in his mouth, nodding. “I hope so.” He flicks a glance at Chuck. 

Chuck nods. “Well, Jimmy, that kind of thing is really Howard’s bailiwick…”

“Yeah, of course,” Jimmy says quickly.

“And if you ask me, Bates v. State Bar of Arizona was one big mistake, but—” Chuck smiles. “But nobody asked me. And to hear Howard tell it, the company is going to crumble to dust after a single scandal unless we invest in some cutting-edge new marketing.” 

Betty gives a solemn nod. “I heard about that. Sounds like that was just a bad choice of client.”

“Well, some people see the flashing lights and get hypnotized, I believe,” Chuck says. He takes a sip of red wine, swishing it in his mouth before swallowing. “But Amendola, the class action…” He points a finger to accent the next sentence: “That’s what will keep HHM on the rise.” 

“We should be saying congratulations, then,” Betty says, holding up her glass of wine. “And good luck to Jimmy.”

Jimmy raises his beer, too, and then takes a swig. As he sets down the bottle, he finally looks to his mother. She’s listening thoughtfully to the resuming conversation at the other end of the table and doesn’t seem to notice his gaze. He’s struck yet again by just how old she looks, just how sunken the dips are beneath her eyes. “Pass the brussels sprouts, Mom?” he asks, after a moment.

Ruth looks over to him, then nods and hands over the bowl. 

Jimmy adds some sprouts to his plate then sets the bowl down. “Remember how much I used to hate these?” he says to her. 

Ruth smiles. “You always said you could smell them from upstairs. Said you couldn’t even be in the same house as them.”

“Hah,” Jimmy says, shaking his head. “That was just so I could go out drinking with Marco.” 

His mother’s lips lift in a small smile. “I know that.”

Jimmy chuckles. “I really didn’t like them much, though,” he adds. He stabs one with his fork now, and chews it, and nods. “But these are great!” He turns to the other end of the table. “What’s on them, anyway?”

“It’s a balsamic glaze,” Rebecca says.

“Revolutionary,” Jimmy says, jabbing his fork at the air for emphasis. He eats another one, then chuckles. “The bacon doesn’t hurt either.” 

“Pancetta,” Chuck says. 

“Hm?”

“Not bacon,” Chuck says, setting down his cutlery. “Pancetta.”

Jimmy shrugs. “I dunno, Chuck, if it looks like a pig, oinks like a pig…” He raises his eyebrows significantly and pops another brussels sprout into his mouth. 

But Chuck only shakes his head, and everyone falls to silence after that, just the scrape of cutlery over their mother’s good china.

Jimmy swallows. “Hey,” he says, glancing around at everyone and grinning. “Remember how much Dad wanted to make his own cranberry sauce?” 

“Oh no,” Ruth says, dropping her head into her hands. “Don’t remind me, honey.”

“I had forgotten about that,” Chuck says. “I don’t think he was ever satisfied.” 

“Right?” Jimmy says, smiling. “He’d go _crazy_ over it.”

“What do you mean?” Rebecca asks, looking between them. 

“Dad's mother—our grandmother—used to make cranberry sauce when he was young,” Chuck says. “She died before I was born, but Dad was determined to reproduce it every Thanksgiving.” 

“He’d ruin a good pot every year in trying, too,” Ruth says, laughing softly. “And the sauce would always boil over. The whole kitchen would be sticky for weeks.” 

Jimmy joins in laughing. “And he’d always order in all those bags of frozen cranberries for the shop,” he says. “And none of the canned stuff! He’d try to tell people to make their own, instead.” 

Ruth shakes her head slowly.

“Pissed off all his customers right before the holidays. And he’d have a whole freezer filled with the stuff. Like, the people are going to want this!” Jimmy chuckles, wiping a thumb under an eye. “And they never did!”

“And I was stuck making cranberry pies for months,” his mother adds. 

“Hey, those were good,” Jimmy says. He lifts up his beer then chuckles again. “Just another one of Dad’s bad business ideas—” 

There’s an audible scrape of knives on china. 

Jimmy swallows. He takes a sip of beer, and his lips pop off the end of the bottle with a little hollow noise. 

His mother exhales quietly. “He always did have more passion than sense,” she says softly. 

Jimmy shuts down his thoughts before they drift upstairs again, up to the cupboard in his old bedroom. 

Ruth sighs again. “But your father always wanted to think the best of people. Even if that meant hoping all the tired Western Electric workers were going to make their own cranberry sauce.” She smiles to herself, then looks over at Chuck. “Pass the gravy, would you, honey?”

It seems to take a moment for the words to register for Chuck, but eventually he nods, and he hands down the gravy boat. His eyes skim over Jimmy like a stone on a lake. 

* * *

Jimmy wipes out the kitchen sink and tucks the sponge back into its little tub, then wanders into the living room. The others are sitting around the coffee table, lethargic. Bing Crosby is singing on the record player again.

Betty looks up at Jimmy and nods. “So, what’s your vote?” she asks. 

Jimmy makes a questioning noise. “Vote?” 

She gestures to the stack of board games on the coffee table. “We’re at a stalemate. Two for _Monopoly,_ two for _Clue.”_

“Oh, ah…” Jimmy looks at the pile of tattered boxes, the cardboard worn away at the ends. He grins. _“Monopoly.”_

Betty laughs delightedly. _“Monopoly_ it is!” 

“Dangerous choice,” Chuck says softly. He’s leaning back in an armchair, his fingers laced over his stomach. He inclines his head to Jimmy significantly.

Jimmy holds up his hands. “You can be the banker this time.” 

Chuck narrows his eyes. 

Jimmy grabs the _Monopoly_ box from the pile and puts the others aside. He sits cross-legged before the coffee table, and the others lean forward on their chairs. 

They play for the next couple of hours. As Jimmy negotiates a trade with Rebecca for her railways, or gives higher mortgage rates than the bank, or gives his mother an advance on her trip past ‘Go’, he can see the steam rising from Chuck’s ears, and it reminds him of so many other games when they were younger: squabbling about breaking the rules or whether it’s based on skill or chance.

“For god’s sake, Jimmy,” Chuck says, as Jimmy offers Rebecca a postponement on her rent when she lands on his Virginia Avenue. “It’s in the rules. She _has_ to pay, or mortgage a property.” 

“She’ll pay me,” Jimmy says brightly. “After she gets her two hundred bucks in a couple of turns. With interest.”

“That’s—” Chuck pinches the bridge of his nose. He huffs out a sharp breath.

Rebecca pats Chuck’s knee. “I think I have to take the deal, sorry,” she says, leaning over to shake Jimmy’s hand. 

“Done,” Jimmy says. 

Rebecca only has half a mind in the game anyway, darting two and from the kitchen as she prepares whatever they’re having with dessert. Betty take her turns for her, calling out what square she’s landed on so Rebecca can respond in the kitchen. And Betty takes some of Ruth’s turns, too, as his mother leans back in her chair with Delilah on her lap, the old cat purring contentedly. 

A little later, Chuck sighs again. “Jimmy, if you didn’t want it, it’s supposed to go to auction.”

“I did want it,” Jimmy says, dancing the red Illinois Avenue card between them. “I wanted it so I could sell it to _you_.”

Chuck huffs out through his nose, staring angrily down at his two other red cards. “That’s against the intention of the rules. What’s the point in even having the auction system if you can just immediately on-sell the property?”

Jimmy lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Because if I didn’t know how much you needed it, I would’ve let it go. But I do.” He grins broadly. “So I didn’t.” 

“It’s not in the spirit of the game.”

“Chuck, it’s _Monopoly._ This _is_ the game.”

“It is not,” Chuck says acidly. “I’m not paying you more than what you bought it for.”

“Suit yourself,” Jimmy says, and he tucks the deed card beside his others. 

So Jimmy has always said it’s a game of skill, and, sure enough, it comes down to him and Chuck at the end—Chuck slowly bleeding money as he lands on all of Jimmy’s hotels, while Jimmy’s own pockets are deep from all his inter-player interest rates, from bankrupting the others. 

Eventually, they just decide to call it, and Chuck gives a half-hearted congratulations and rises from his armchair. 

Ruth leans forward and lowers Delilah gently to the ground, then looks over to Jimmy. “Don’t look so smug,” she says quietly. “You know how much your brother cares about rules.” 

Jimmy shrugs. “It’s good for him.” 

“Ever since you were kids, always winding him up,” Ruth says, shaking her head. 

So Jimmy exhales slowly. He packs up the board, collecting all the houses and hotels and player pieces, carefully sorting them back into their little holes. He slides the lid onto the box, then pushes up off the floor and walks into the kitchen, where Chuck’s holding a pie die and studying it intensely. 

He looks up at Jimmy and frowns. “Does this pie look set?” he asks, gesturing with the dish. 

“Uh, I wouldn’t know,” Jimmy says, glancing down at the pumpkin pie. Three walnuts make a perfect little flower in the center. “Looks good, though.”

“Yes,” Chuck says, and he sets it down on the countertop. 

“Listen, Chuck, I’m sorry about the game.”

“Why?” Chuck says mildly. “You won.” 

“Right,” Jimmy says. He leans his hip against the counter. “But still. We’ll play it your way next time. I’ll bet those rules aren’t _all_ bad.” 

“Sure, Jimmy,” Chuck says. He opens a drawer and pulls out a stack of small plates, counting five of them. “Tell the others dessert is ready, would you?” 

Jimmy nods, and he returns to the living room. They all move slowly back to the table, sitting in the same spots as before; though they’re quieter this time, the conversation dwindling until it’s just the scrape of forks on plates and the occasional compliment about the pumpkin pie. 

* * *

Later that night, after everybody else has already gone upstairs, Jimmy sits on top of his covers with his legs out straight before him, leaning against the back of the fold-out. He flicks idly through some old magazines he found in the room earlier: 70’s fashion and housekeeping, with weird, dated home-decorating tips. 

For a while, he can still hear noises from upstairs, footsteps along the hallways, but soon there’s silence. It’s late, but Jimmy’s not tired at all, and when he finishes skimming through the last magazine, he stands and moves to the window, pulling back the blinds and looking out into the front yard and the street beyond. The neighbors opposite still have their lights on, and there’s several cars parked up out front, rusting old things that seem like they’ve been in the neighborhood as long as his mother has. 

Jimmy breathes out slowly. He remembers having block parties in the street over the summer. He wonders if they still do that. If the new families still barbecue food between the foreclosed houses and overgrown yards. If his mother still joins them like she used to, sitting on the stoop and laughing. 

He heads down the hallway, soft-footed, and into the kitchen. It’s dark, and the light of the refrigerator casts long shadows when he opens the door, picking some turkey off the carcass. He closes the door and eats the meat idly as he leans against the counter. 

A little red light flashes on his mother’s answering machine. Jimmy watches it for a while: on, off, on off. It’s bright enough to color everything around it red too, the fruit bowl and potted fern. 

He finishes his turkey and walks over to the phone. The light flicks, on and off. He picks up the handset itself and takes it back to the family room, then sits on the edge of the fold-out sofa. 

There’s a quiet rush of a car going past outside. 

Jimmy glances at the clock, looking at the glowing digits for a moment, and then he dials the familiar number. 

A click. “Hello?” 

“Hey,” Jimmy says. “Happy Thanksgiving.” 

Kim chuckles. “Happy Thanksgiving yourself.” A pause. “And just in time.”

Another glance at the clock. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“Nah, I’m up,” Kim says. “My popcorn’s ready though, hang on.” He hears the beep of a microwave, and then rustling noises until Kim returns. “Okay, all set.”

“Popcorn, huh? Whatcha watching?” 

“A Thanksgiving classic,” Kim says dryly. “ _No Way Out_.”

Jimmy grins. “Nice. Costner at his best.” 

Kim makes a humming noise of agreement. “So how’s the family?” 

“Oh, you know,” Jimmy says lightly. He looks out into the darkness of the hallway. “Going strong.” 

There’s a beat of silence, then Kim says, “Yeah?”

Jimmy chuckles. “We played _Monopoly._ ”

“Oh boy,” Kim says. “So who lost an eye?”

“Hah. Me, I think,” Jimmy says. “I get pretty into it.” 

Kim makes a little snorting noise. “Very cool.” 

“Shut up,” Jimmy says. He shifts so that he’s leaning against the back of the sofa again, relaxing into the cushions. “What about you? Good day?”

“Mhm,” Kim says. “Andrea’s gone to visit family, so I’m enjoying having the place all to myself. Drowning in Thai food.”

“Nice,” Jimmy says, drawing out the word. 

“You have a turkey?” Kim asks. “All the fixings?”

“Yeah. Chuck and Rebecca, like, Italianed everything up,” he says. “It was good, though.” His gaze wanders over the video tape spines in the cabinet beside the television: lots of his mother’s favorites, Cary Grant and Gene Kelly. Nestled in between them are more modern titles, and others where his mother has repurposed the cases of movies she disliked. A scrap of paper reading _That Hamilton Woman_ rests beneath the plastic but above the original cover for _The Boys from Brazil_. “Weird to be back here again, though,” Jimmy says softly. He brushes his hair off his forehead and looks away from the video tapes. “So, what was a Wexler Thanksgiving like?”

Kim breathes out, and the silence that follows is long enough that he worries she’s not going to answer, but then she says, “Well, me and Mom would go to the diner. They’d always put on a roast, a big turkey, all that stuff.”

Jimmy catches the phrasing: me and Mom, and Mom only. He doesn’t say anything. 

“Lots of people would be there, so it was kind of communal,” Kim says. “It wasn’t bad. Not the traditional family thing, though.”

“It sounds nice,” he says quietly. “Would it snow?”

“Yeah,” Kim says. “Yeah, sometimes it would snow.”

Jimmy tries to picture it. Flat white fields dotted with fence posts, like ellipses on a page, drifting into the distance, the November sun a cold disc above it all. Young Kim throwing snowballs at the world, her blonde hair up in pigtails, wearing a round puffy jacket. A little blue dot in the endless fields of white. He exhales. “Kim?”

She hums. “Yeah?”

“Can we go back to White Sands?” he asks.

A beat. “What, tonight? That might be pretty tricky.”

“Not like that. I just mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Kim says warmly. 

Jimmy sighs. “But I don’t even—I just mean, can we talk? Like really talk?” 

There’s silence from the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?” Kim asks, after a moment.

He gives a little effacing, breathy laugh. “Yeah, it’s okay. No big arguments or anything. I just feel like a fucking kid again, you know?”

Kim gives a gentle laugh. “Yeah.”

Jimmy leans back, folding his legs up beneath him. “We haven’t all been together like this in a long time. Not since—well, not since it all went down with—with Chet and everything.”

Kim makes a murmured noise of agreement. 

“And I treated Chuck pretty shit that last time we were together. I was just…just _screaming_ at him. I can’t even remember why.” Jimmy laughs breathily again. “But I can’t tell if Rebecca knows, and her mother’s here too, and nobody’s brought it up! So what can I do?” He sighs. It’s always easy to be open with Kim, and without seeing her it’s even easier, like he’s just talking to himself, alone in a dimly lit room. But his next words still surprise him: “And I think Mom is scared of me.”

Kim inhales.

“Not dangerous scared, not like that,” Jimmy says quickly, brain catching up with his mouth. He tips his head back onto the top of the sofa. “But scared of what I might do next. Scared to get too close, maybe.”

The silence down the other end of the line feels enormous, crackling with dust and distance. It’s like he can hear the connection between them, the long strands of copper wire humming over the country. “Is there anything you can do?” Kim asks finally. 

Jimmy hums. “Nothing, I guess. Just keep steady.”

“Well, that’s good news, then, isn’t it?” Kim says. “You’re already doing that.”

“Huh,” Jimmy says. He scratches his cheek. “Yeah, I guess I am.” 

“She’ll see,” Kim says quietly, he hears her shifting on her couch. “She’ll eventually see.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy murmurs. He tucks a hand behind his head, threading his fingers into his hair, staring up at the vine-patterned cornice. He counts the leaves, one-two-three, but his brain keeps racing, and he still feels half a step behind something, like there’s something just around the next bend, like the top of a mountain that keeps vanishing into the distance, pulled taut away from him. 

And then, as if she can feel the tension and wants to break it, Kim says, “You know, we could do more than just talk.” 

Jimmy’s breath catches, and his head snaps forward. “Oh yeah?” he says, after a moment of silence that could have been seconds or could have been minutes. 

“Yeah,” Kim says, and he hears her laugh lightly. “But, uh—Jimmy, you’re using the only line, right? No surprise extensions?”

“Jesus,” Jimmy says, grimacing a little. “Yeah, yeah it’s just me. It’s secure.”

“Good.”

“I mean, I haven’t checked the window, so Gene Hackman might be out there with an audio dish, but—yeah.” He glances to the window then starts upright. “Hang on. Shit. I’m in the family room.”

“What?”

“I’m in the family room. Rebecca’s mom’s in my old room,” Jimmy says, rising to his feet and looking out through the open archway into the hall. 

“The cartoon grandma?”

Jimmy chuckles. “Yeah, that’s her. Hang on. Anyone could walk in.”

Kim’s voice comes through muffled, like she’s covering her face: “Oh my god.” 

He walks out into the hallway with the phone, peering down toward the living room, then turning around to face the front door. “Bear with me, Kim, I’ll figure something out.” Kim’s stifled laughter is loud against his ear, and he’s grinning, too, so he keeps going: “I like a problem, right? I’m a problem solver. Never met a problem I couldn’t—” he opens a cupboard, it’s filled with old electronics and kitchen gadgets “—couldn’t solve.” He closes it, then walks down the hall, looking into the kitchen as he passes. “They, uh, used to call me Nancy Drew, ‘cause I really know how to get to the bottom of a—” he whips open the basement door and grins “—mystery.”

Kim gives a final little chuckle.

Jimmy steps into the basement and flicks on the light then closes the door behind him. “Okay, I’m good. I found a basement.”

“Lovely,” Kim says. “And it’s cartoon-grandma proof?”

“Don’t even joke,” Jimmy says, and he surveys the space.

The basement is loaded with boxes and old furniture, and he couldn’t finish descending the stairs even if he wanted to, because his mother’s loaded the bottom few up with papers.

“Jesus, it’s cold in here, though,” he says, his breath puffing out before him. He sits down on the top step, his back against the door. 

“But, you’re safe?” Kim asks quietly. 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, clutching the phone to his ear. He huffs out a little laugh. “Kim, you for real? Thanksgiving dirty talk? That’s what we’re saying here, right? Just so we're on the same page.” 

“I dunno, Jimmy,” Kim says dryly. “Maybe the mood is lost, now.” 

He’s silent, looking down into the basement.

“I’m kidding,” Kim says quietly. “Don’t leave me hanging.” 

Jimmy smiles. “I would never.” 

“So how do you want to—” her voice cuts off, but he can still hear her breathing. 

Jimmy exhales.

“Hmm,” Kim says, and then her voice comes lowly: “So, what would you do if I was there right now?” 

“Jesus, okay,” Jimmy says. “I mean, we’d be in here. Away from everyone else.” He chuckles. “Except there’d be a heater on.”

“A heater, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s a fantasy, right?” But he tries to picture Kim in the cold basement with him, tries to picture her next to him at the top of the stairs, and he finds he can’t. “Or maybe I’m there with you,” he says instead. “And we’re sitting on the sofa. We just watched a movie. Uh— _The Towering Inferno_.”

Kim laughs brightly. “Okay.”

“I’m setting a scene, Kim. I’m a wordsmith.”

“Sure,” she says. 

And then there’s silence again, just breathing. 

“Okay, we’ve just watched the credits roll on Steve McQueen,” Kim says gently. “So now what? What would you do if you were here?” 

Jimmy imagines the cosy living room of Kim’s apartment. He imagines the soft glow of the television, the empty boxes of takeout on the coffee table. He imagines sitting beside her, their knees a few inches apart. “Well—first I’d want to touch you,” he says, gruff and tentative. “I miss touching you.” It’s the first time he’s really spoken out loud about that physical intimacy, and something unwinds in his stomach, something that’s been coiled there a long time. 

“Touch me where?” Kim asks softly. 

“Everywhere,” Jimmy says. He breathes out, tipping his head back against the cold door, eyes tracing over the bare basement ceiling. “I guess...you have this little dip in your waist.” 

“My waist, Jimmy?”

“Hey,” he says, chuckling. “I’m warming up.”

And Kim exhales, and it sounds heavier than it did earlier. “You know, I had bruises there after last time.”

Jimmy gasps. 

“I’d look at them in the mirror,” Kim says, quickly. “When we got back. Before going to bed. Getting dressed for work the next morning.” There’s a moment of quiet, then she adds: “I thought you might notice somehow.”

Jimmy huffs out a breath. “Yeah,” he says roughly. “I dunno, Kim, I tried not to look at you too close.”

Another moment of quiet, then: “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. 

“Why not?”

Jimmy closes his eyes, pressing his head against the door. He can feel the strain in his jeans now, and he slips his hand beneath the waistband—and his fingers are ice cold, even above his boxers, and he grimaces. 

“You okay?” Kim murmurs. 

He wonders what noise she just heard, and he tucks his hand over his thigh, warming it up. “Yeah, just—it’s real cold in here.” He laughs lightly. “Gotta wait a bit.”

Kim makes a little ragged sound, and it’s almost enough to make him forget the temperature again—and if it isn’t, the next question she asks is: “Why did you try not to look at me, Jimmy?” 

He breathes out slowly. “I thought about it a lot. There’s a lock on the supply room door.”

“Is there?” 

“Shush, it’s a fantasy, doesn’t matter,” Jimmy says warmly. “And anyway, I guess I thought if I looked at you too closely I’d have to drag you in there, and slam the door, and lock it, or something dramatic—just get us in there as fast as I could—and you’re in that one skirt, the grey one—”

Kim inhales. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Jesus, Kim, I thought you knew,” he says. “The one with the, like—the side zip at the top.”

“Okay,” Kim says softly. “I know the one.” 

And the words are flowing easier now, like a rhythm: “Anyway, I don’t even kiss you, ‘cause I can’t wait, so I just drop to my knees and start pushing up that skirt, and you help—uh, with the zip—and I pull down your underwear slowly, even though I can’t wait to—to taste you.” He inhales sharply, then chuckles. “And, remember this is a fantasy, so make sure your imaginary Jimmy is like, smoother than smooth.” 

Kim laughs huskily, ragged. “Okay.” 

“So I pull down your underwear, and lean in, and you grab my head and twist your fingers in my hair and hold me there—”

There’s a noise upstairs and Jimmy quietens, though he was speaking so softly there’s no way anyone could have heard him. He holds still, and he can hear his pulse under his skin, can hear the crackle of the phone and Kim breathing heavily on the other end—and that last has him finally moving his hand, warm now, and he touches himself over his boxers, gasping quietly down the line. 

“Tell me what I do,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. 

“Okay,” Kim says throatily. “So I’m holding you there, that’s okay?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. 

“And you’re grabbing my thighs for balance. And I think I might have bruises again because you’re holding so tight. And it feels so good, Jimmy, and you just—” and she falls silent, voice trailing off until Jimmy can only hear her arrhythmic gasps. 

But it’s quiet upstairs again, so he picks it up. “And then I…” he begins, and then he feels awkward, and loses the right words, so he closes his eyes and just murmurs: “I’m there, Kim, I’m there.” She inhales sharply at his words, so he continues, rubbing his palm over himself. “I’m there, I’m right there, fuck Kim, I can’t believe how good it is, how good you are, I need it, you’re everything—” 

And she gasps—and it’s so loud against his ear Jimmy feels like she’s right beside him, and he squeezes his eyes shut again, holding onto the image—and then Kim’s breathing slows, and he can almost feel it warm against his skin. 

He hears a shuffling noise down the line. Another gentle exhale of breath. 

Kim’s voice finally comes, husky and low: “I bet you'd look beautiful after that. Staring up at me.”

His skin flushes, hot and prickling, and he presses the phone tight to him, and strokes himself slowly over his boxers.

Then Kim murmurs: “I’d need you inside me again.”

Jimmy groans hoarsely, a jolt of electricity running down his spine. “Yeah,” he says thickly. “Yeah.”

“So I’d help you up, and then…”

“What?”

“Maybe we lean up against the door. ‘Cause maybe I’m not so sure there’s really a lock, now. So just to make sure nobody comes in. And we’d have to be really, really quiet.” 

Jimmy nods. “Yeah,” he whispers.

“So we’d move really slow,” Kim says roughly. “So slow, Jimmy.”

And his hand has finally warmed up enough so he slips it beneath his boxers, skin on skin, and he hisses.

“So slow it’s almost like we’re not moving…”

“Yeah,” Jimmy gasps. 

“God, Jimmy,” Kim says. “You have no idea. You’re—you’re not like anything. You’re—” And Kim seems to lose her words for a moment, falling silent, and it’s just breaths and copper wire again, and his heart is thudding so loudly he’s worried someone is going to hear it from upstairs. When she talks, her tone is low: “What do I do, Jimmy?”

“—faster,” he gasps roughly. 

“Okay, I move faster.”

Jimmy speeds up, squeezing his eyes tight.

“And it’s getting hard to keep quiet,” Kim says. “But we have to, and I’m kissing you, trying to keep you from making any noise, but you can’t help it, it’s so good—”

And she keeps talking, but Jimmy can’t hear the words, just the sound of her voice, and he’s not cold at all now, and the basement seems like a furnace, and he can feel sweat beading on his forehead, and he’s burning, his hand like fire—and then he comes, jerking, in his boxers, his head pressed back against the door. 

His pulse rushes in his ears like white noise, a fuzz that slowly dissolves into nothingness. Jimmy exhales shakily. Catches his breath, frees his hand. 

“Wow,” he says quietly. He lets out a light little laugh. “We’re pretty good at that, you know.”

“Yeah,” Kim says, voice still thin between breaths.

There’s a drawn-out, comfortable silence as they each come back to themselves, and then Jimmy adds: “Though, when I said I felt like I kid, I didn’t think I’d actually be jerking off in my boxers and hiding from my mom.”

Kim laughs brightly. 

He joins in, soft and hushed in the quiet basement. After they both stop, they’re quiet for a time, until he says, “Thank you, Kim.”

“Thank you yourself,” she says warmly, and he grins, something tight gripping him in his chest, a pleasant pressure on his sternum. 

After a while, the cold returns, icy on his damp skin. He runs a hand over his face, then stands, and says, “Okay, I’m getting out of this freezing room, hang on.” He opens the door, and is immediately hit with a wave of warmth. “Oh my god, so much better,” he says, closing his eyes in relief. “I think I almost turned into one of those cartoon blocks of ice.”

“But it was worth it?” Kim asks.

“Are you kidding again, Kim? It was _definitely_ worth it,” Jimmy says, grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. He opens his eyes, but as he starts to move down the hallway, he becomes acutely aware of the growing discomfort in his boxers, and he stops. “I, uh, might need to get changed. But we can keep talking, right?”

“Of course,” Kim says, laughing softly. 

Jimmy nods. He makes a note to leave his mother some money for the phone bill, and says, “So I’ll call you back?”

“I’ll be here,” Kim says softly.

He hears her breathe again before he hangs up, one short inhale, crackling down a live wire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading, kudosing, and commenting! i appreciate you guys so much ♥️
> 
> this chapter owes no small debt to Hold Tight to the Ropes by AddioKira - a wonderful, sadly unfinished fic you should all check out!


	14. The Party

There’s snow on the Sandias as Jimmy returns to Albuquerque, a fine dusting over the crumpled peaks like frost. He leans closer to the airplane window, watching folded terrain pass beneath the jet engine and wing. The mountain range rises from the New Mexico desert so suddenly it’s as if some giant has reached down and pinched the land there, pulling the earth around it taut and flat and smooth. 

The plane hits a patch of turbulence and shakes, the fuselage creaking, before steadying again. Below, the desert is mottled by the shadows of clouds, bruised in dark blue. Jimmy wonders whether, if he watched for long enough, he would start to see patterns in the cloud shadows, too: animals and countries and people he’s known. 

He breathes out, sinking into the hard fabric of his seat. Closes his eyes and then opens them quickly, opens them to the bright world beyond the thick window, to the world ahead of him. 

And there, over the mountains: Albuquerque. Even from above, he can see the lines that cut through the earth, right angles and grids, marking out developments and suburbs that will soon rise in the same invisible style as the rest of the city. New houses waiting to be filled with new people. 

Then the city itself, the tangled mess of streets and buildings patterned on the desert surface. The twisting green belt of the Rio Grande that splits it in two. Albuquerque is still unfamiliar to him from the air, but Jimmy tries to find his apartment building all the same, tries to lay the colorful lines of the bus map onto the terrain beneath him. Nothing quite fits. 

Then the plane banks, and he can see the freeways and the taller buildings of downtown— 

—and his mother had hugged him on the stoop that morning, his cab idling in the street, and she had felt so small in his arms until she had let him go, and then, as Jimmy slid into the backseat of the taxi she had turned, closing the door— 

—and there finally below the window is the airport, between the city and the desert edge, like a harbor, and Jimmy grits his teeth and watches the dirt rise up to greet him. 

* * *

Jimmy ashes his cigarette, leaning against the cool concrete of the parking garage wall. “It’s not too late, you know,” he says. “We could go back to mine instead, maybe watch a movie, maybe…” He wiggles his eyebrows. 

Kim chuckles. “Jimmy,” she says, carefully. 

He shrugs. “Just saying. Couldn’t hurt.”

“What, and waste that new shirt?” Kim asks. 

Jimmy looks down at the white dress shirt he bought for the occasion—nicer than his mailroom attire, accented with a patterned tie. 

“Looks good, by the way,” Kim says. 

“Thanks,” Jimmy says, holding out the cigarette to her. “Same to you.”

Kim’s wearing a dark blue dress, much darker than the usual muted blues, beiges and turquoises of her cardigans and skirts. The fabric clings to her sides, hugging into her waist out over her hips, and it’s a wonder she’s not cold in the parking garage because it’s so thin Jimmy can every curve of her. 

Kim brushes his hand with hers as she finally takes the cigarette from him, and he tugs his gaze back up to her face.

She grins at him. “I just hope nobody remembers I wore it last year, too,” she says. 

“Be a shame to only see it once,” Jimmy says softly. 

Kim breathes out smoke and smiles. 

“How _was_ last year, anyway?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. 

Kim just closes her eyes in response. 

“Hah,” Jimmy says, grinning. “Gotta say, closest I’ve ever done to a work holiday party is when Merna would bring us regulars out back of Arno’s and we’d throw a year’s worth of empty whiskey bottles at the brick wall.” He chuckles, then mimes throwing bottles, one, two: “Just _kshh! kshh!_ you know? Like fireworks.”

Kim raises her eyebrows, smile twitching on her lips. “Wow.” 

“Always had a bit of a competition going to see how many we’d end up with for the next year’s celebrations.”

Kim laughs gently. “Just what HHM needs.”

There’s a beat of silence. “Yeah, maybe I’ll pitch it to Howard,” Jimmy says bitterly. 

Kim’s eyes soften. “Still haven’t heard?” 

“Nah,” Jimmy says, holding his hand out for the cigarette again. “Saw some of the new billboards up, though.” He draws in smoke, then exhales it with his next words: “Down on Lomas.” 

Kim reaches out and brushes a fleck of ash from his shirt breast silently, then she looks back up and tilts her head at him. 

Jimmy raises and lowers his shoulders. “They’re okay. Definitely very blue.”

“Very blue,” Kim repeats, and then she gives him a soft smile. “Sounds like they could get lost in the sky.” She holds up a hand and looks at it studiously for a moment, then returns her gaze to him. “You know, hard to see.” 

“Yeah, well…” Jimmy says. He takes another drag on the cigarette and looks out into the darkened void of the parking garage for a moment, out at the long shadows and rust-stained walls. There seem to be more cars here than usual tonight, their drivers and passengers already upstairs at the party.

Kim shifts against the wall, and he turns back to her. 

“So, you’re still sure you wanna go up there?” Jimmy says. “Because I’ve heard there’s a perfectly lockable supply cupboard somewhere in the mailroom.”

Kim laughs. “Rumors and hearsay,” she says lightly. 

“Yeah.” Jimmy takes another smoke, then says, “All right, I fold. Go schmooze with your future lawyer friends.” He waves the cigarette. “I’ll finish this.” 

“Okay,” Kim says, pushing off the wall. She walks a few steps then turns back. “You’re gonna come up though, right?” 

Jimmy shrugs. “Sure.” 

She still lingers. 

“I’ll see you. Someone has to make trouble,” he says, flashing her a smile.

Kim grins back at him and then leaves, heading through the door into the landing. Jimmy waits in the cold garage for a little while longer, for a little while after he’s ground out his cigarette with the base of his shoe. He grits his teeth at stares at the darkness, at the long shadows of the pillars, at the curved shadows of the lined-up cars, seeing patterns in the shapes of them. 

* * *

Jimmy rides the elevator up to the first floor and steps out into the HHM lobby. It’s crowded with people, associates and assistants who are harder to recognize out of their usual business suits. Lively chatter and bubbly Christmas music fills the air.

It’s night, and the world beyond the Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill lobby has vanished into the darkness. String lights hang over the tall windows of the foyer and twist around the railings of the main stairs and second floor balcony. As Jimmy walks deeper into the lobby he turns, craning up at the people who lean against the banister with drinks in their hands, and then running his gaze down along the walls, where silver tinsel lines the edges of the usual art pieces.

Catering staff move around with trays of canapés, and Jimmy snags a mini quiche from the first woman to pass him. He stands eating it for a moment, scanning the scattered groups of people gathered in conversation, the occasional Santa hat and reindeer antlers decorating the close heads of the participants. 

There’s movement alongside him, and Jimmy turns to see Chuck coming to a stop at his side. Chuck looks as if he’s just stepped out of his office and is seconds away from heading back there again, one hand tight at his hip as if he’s clutching an invisible case file. 

“Hey, Chuck,” Jimmy says. He gestures around the lobby with his half-eaten mini quiche. “Great do. Really nice.” 

Chuck nods, examining the party, too. 

They stand in silence, tension visible in Chuck’s shoulders. Jimmy studies his brother’s face for a moment, then asks, “You still working?”

“Ah—well, you know how it goes,” Chuck says, and he grimaces. “We have to pick these dates so far in advance.”

“I’ll cover for you,” Jimmy says. “Keep the family distracted while you go upstairs and read your college textbooks, huh?” 

Chuck gives a little laugh. “Yes, well. Maybe don’t do a song and dance number on the kitchen table this time.”

Jimmy shakes his head slowly. “All right,” he says, making a disappointed _tsk_ noise. “These guys all would’ve loved it, though.”

“I have no doubt,” Chuck says. He remains for a moment longer, looking out at the party beside Jimmy, and then he moves on, stopping by another group, who greet him with warm smiles and part to welcome him into the fold. 

Jimmy pops his last bite of quiche into his mouth. He still hasn’t spotted Kim, and he stands for a moment longer beneath the overhang of the first floor balcony, catching fragments of the conversations going on around him. Some gossip about a judge and her golf game, or a scandal involving a man Jimmy’s pretty sure is the Green of Reeves and Green.

He takes another canapé from a passing waiter and then heads deeper into the party, weaving his way across the lobby and then up the main flight of stairs, where well-dressed people he barely recognizes linger unevenly against the banister. 

It’s less crowded up on the second floor. Jimmy stops to chat for a moment with a couple of the third floor associates—Trina and Nate, both ready drag him into their debate about famine relief and Bush’s lame duck days—but then he finally sees Kim, standing in the corner of the hallway. 

His eyes snap to her as if he’s somehow always known she was there but he’s only now looking, a precise and targeted movement: _there, Kim._

Beneath the hanging Christmas lights, she’s luminous. She’s holding two glasses of red wine, talking easily to a bald man beside her: Bruce, a new first year associate, who’s cradling a scotch and grinning. 

Jimmy wanders over. 

“Jimmy,” Kim says warmly, eyes lighting up as she spots him. “I was just about to come looking for you, maybe send out a search party.” She holds out one of the glasses of red wine. “Here.”

Jimmy accepts the glass. “Thanks,” he says, smiling at her. “So what’d I miss?”

“Bruce is scaring me with stories of the bar exam,” Kim says. 

Bruce laughs. “Inspiring a healthy dose of anxiety, maybe! Can’t be resting on your laurels yet.”

Kim chuckles, shaking her head, and Jimmy sips his wine. It’s soft and velvet on his tongue. 

“I’m serious, Kim,” Bruce adds. “You just wait. Next semester’s gonna kick you in the ass. I think it’s their last ditch attempt to weed out the weaklings.” He grimaces. “Felt like I was shoveling snow in a blizzard, getting through all those readings. I almost died of exposure.” 

“And now what, smooth sailing?” Kim asks. 

Bruce gives a little self-effacing smile. “Don’t let Mr. McGill hear it, but working here is a cake walk compared to taking another 3L class with Halbert.” He quickly looks to Jimmy, as if Jimmy is in the habit of regularly sharing office gossip with his brother.

Jimmy holds up his free hand innocently.

Bruce taps the side of his nose and then turns back to Kim. “I’m serious. I don’t know how you’re going to manage with night school and the mailroom,” he says, voice lowering. 

Kim makes a little face. “Nothing for it but to try, I guess.”

“Now, why do I suddenly get the feeling you’re going to make it look easy?” Bruce says, shaking his head. 

“Well, Kim’s actually just a stack of law textbooks in a long trenchcoat,” Jimmy says. 

Bruce laughs. “That I’d believe!”

“Don’t poke her too hard, they’ll all come spilling out.” Jimmy prods Kim on the shoulder. 

Kim swats his hand away. “All right, enough. This is supposed to be a party,” she says, but she’s smiling. “No more fearmongering, okay?” 

Bruce lifts his palms. “I make no promises.” He sips his scotch. “Especially when it comes to Halbert’s class. You need to start preparing before it’s too late.” 

“You talking Hellish Halbert?” Nate asks. He and Trina join the group, and Kim groans but soon joins in commiserating with the others—all recent UNM graduates eager to tell Kim the kind of horror stories Jimmy has no doubt were once told to them. He drinks his wine and laughs with them, the key names familiar enough after months of talking to Kim that he can follow the gist of the gossip. 

As they talk, more catering staff drift by with plates, and it’s easy for Jimmy to stand there and listen, eating his way through canapé after canapé. At some point after the second go-round of the pigs in a blanket, the conversation shifts, and Kim starts picking the others’ brains, weedsy legal talk that slides off Jimmy like water. He nods along when he can, trying to judge the right reaction from their tones, from Kim’s eyes as they dart to his every so often, but, as the minutes drag by, it gets harder and harder to even pretend to concentrate. 

“Another drink?” he murmurs to Kim when she looks to him the next time, and she nods. He takes her empty glass and heads downstairs. 

As Jimmy descends the main staircase, he sees Chuck slinking off on his own again, weaving between the groups. Jimmy slows to a stop beside the banister, staring down at his brother. 

Chuck’s hair is thinning on the top, and his shoulders are a little stooped, and he looks, Jimmy thinks, suddenly old. Maybe it’s the evening bags under his eyes, or maybe it’s being surrounded by all the bright young associates, or maybe Jimmy’s just remembering those graduation photographs again—Chuck on mottled grey, smiling and proud in his dustless frames, kept clean.

Then Chuck moves out of sight. For a few moments there’s still the gap in the crowd, still the parted route his brother took, until that, too, closes. Jimmy chews his lip, staring at the space for a time longer, and then someone jostles him on their way down the stairs, and he shakes himself and keeps moving. 

He’s handing over his dirty wine glasses to the woman behind the drinks table when Howard comes up beside him. Jimmy raises his eyebrows and nods.

“Ah—Jimmy!” Howard says, white-toothed. “Good evening.” 

“Nice party.” Jimmy does another little gesture around the room. 

“Well, the caterers are quite good. Dad’s been using them since we moved into this building, you know,” Howard says mildly. “Very reliable.”

“Sure,” Jimmy says. He takes two glasses of red wine, then pauses, standing there. 

Howard smiles, eyes flicking between the two wine glasses and Jimmy’s face. “Well, I shouldn’t keep you.”

“Uh, right,” Jimmy says, distractedly. He glances over to the bank of elevators and the closed door to the stairwell and frowns, then looks back to the man before him. He clears his throat. “Hey, Howard, you got a minute?”

Howard pauses for the smallest of moments, and then smiles. “Of course, my friend! What’s eating you?”

With a gesture to the stairwell, Jimmy says, “Maybe somewhere a little more private?”

Howard beckons for Jimmy to lead on. They head over to the stairwell, and Jimmy holds the door ajar for Howard and then closes them both inside. The party noise is immediately diminished, music and voices and laughter muffled, and it feels too dark after all the festive lights: the stairwell illuminated only by a single blueish wall-lamp up on the switchback. 

“Now, Jimmy, before you start, I’m sure I can guess what this is about,” Howard says mildly. 

Jimmy shrugs. He realizes he’s still holding the two glasses of red wine, and he moves past Howard to set them down atop the square stair-rail, lingering there with his back to the other man. 

“It was a very difficult decision,” Howard says behind him, his moneyed voice echoing in the stairwell. “The partners went back and forth over a number of options. But we wanted to give each and every submission the benefit of our expertise, so we’ve been drafting a letter of critique to assist you should you pursue this again.”

Jimmy shifts one of wine glasses slightly further away from the edge of the rail. 

“I apologize that it’s taken so long to get back to you,” Howard says. 

Jimmy turns. 

With a little smile, Howard inclines his head to Jimmy regally. 

Something hot begins to boil in Jimmy’s stomach. He breathes out carefully through his nose, then says, “So that’s it?” 

Howard opens his mouth but pauses, furrowing his brow. “Well, as I said, we’re drafting a letter.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, nodding slowly, and then he frowns. “Was I close, at least?” He gestures between them, back and forth. “How did the presentation go?”

Howard makes a little obscure face. “We just went in a different direction, Jimmy. We loved your enthusiasm. Lots of great passion.” At Jimmy’s silence, he continues: “Though I have to say, the, ah—” he holds up his hands, the ice in his scotch clinking against the glass “—well, the whole rhyming slogan thing is a little sixties.” 

The boiling in Jimmy’s stomach intensifies. “Right,” he says. “I get it.”

And Howard smiles now, the expression breaking brightly over his face. “Good, Jimmy, I’m glad. And I hope you’ll give it another shot some time.”

Jimmy folds his arms, fingers tightening on his biceps. “When were you going to tell me?” he asks slowly. It’s been over a month, he thinks. And— “The new billboards have been up for a week.”

“The new billboards, yes,” Howard says, eyes widening, and he waves a hand as if brushing away Jimmy’s first question. “So you’ve seen them? What do you think?” 

Jimmy almost jokes about them getting lost in the sky, but then he clenches his teeth. “Very sensible,” he says instead. 

“Yes,” Howard says, nodding. The ice cubes tinkle in his glass, settling. He glances to the door, then back to Jimmy. In the dim stairwell, Howard looks like a little kid in his father’s suit. 

Jimmy feels the sneer build on his face and does nothing to stop it.

“Well, I ought to be getting back,” Howard says blandly. 

“Yeah, you do that,” Jimmy murmurs. He turns away, and he hears the door open and then close. In that split second, the party is briefly audible again, raised voices and laughter, before a heavy silence returns to the stairwell. 

Jimmy picks up one of the glasses of wine and drinks it slowly. It spreads warmly through his body, humming. He sets it down empty on the banister then picks up the other full glass and starts to walk up the stairs with it, footfalls heavy and echoing. 

He lingers on the first floor landing. Blurred shapes move past the frosted glass window in the door, hiding and revealing the light of the hallway beyond. Jimmy stands there watching them, fingers tight on his wine glass, and he suddenly remembers late nights at his childhood home, sitting on the top step with his arms wrapped around his knees, studying the shadows that fell against the wall at the bottom of the turning staircase: dark shapes that drifted and warped on the white wallpaper as the adults moved up and down the hallway, in and out of his mother’s living room. 

They had seemed so mysterious, then—great, exaggerated figures moving darkly when he should have been asleep. 

They had seemed to walk through a world much larger than his own. 

* * *

Later, Jimmy returns to Kim's group, holding two new glasses of wine to replace the pair that he downed in the stairwell and that he can now feel moving liquidly beneath his skin, sluggish and fuzzy. He hands a glass over to Kim and she smiles to him, her fingers brushing his as she takes it from him. 

“You good?” she murmurs. 

“Hm?” Jimmy says, looking up from her hand to her face. “Oh—yeah.” He smiles broadly. “What are we talking about?”

“Hiya, Jimmy,” says a woman it takes him a moment to place—Clara, the nervous assistant he once spilled coffee all over a stack of papers for. “We’re just talking shop.” 

“Yes, I hate to say it, but still the bar exam,” Kim adds, and she smiles at Jimmy wryly, her eyes flashing. “Almost enough to make me think I’ve taken it already.”

Jimmy chuckles. 

“Clara!” a voice calls, and the group splits to admit Carl Vernon, his usual Rolex gleaming on his wrist, his thinning hair slick beneath the strings of Christmas lights. “Clara, how are you? I must admit I miss you,” he says. “This new girl is nowhere near as efficient.” 

Clara raises her eyebrows as if it’s the first she’s heard anything of the sort. 

“You moved up?” Jimmy asks her.

“—you really need to show her your system for keeping my case notes,” Vernon says, and he rises to his toes to peer around over the top of their heads. “Track her down, she should be here somewhere.” 

“Sure,” Clara says indulgently, and then she turns to Jimmy and nods. “HHM took me on as an assistant while I was studying for the bar. I had more trouble passing it than I should’ve, but I got there in the end.”

“Congratulations,” he says, tipping his glass to Clara. 

“Thank you,” Clara says. She looks to Kim. “You have one semester left, right?”

Kim grimaces. 

“Oh, I took a break after I finished,” Clara says quickly, “and I think that made the bar much harder for me than it needed to be. Just rip it off like a Band-Aid, yeah?”

Jimmy takes a long drink, feeling their conversation dissolve into a low level buzzing that it’s hard for him to really pay attention to. 

But then Rolex Vernon's voice cuts through it: “Well, it’s not so bad if you have the aptitude for it.” He abandons his scanning search for his new assistant to smile slickly at them. “I’ve always tested well. And the right study system is key, of course.” 

There's a moment of silence, nobody quite ready to fill it. So Jimmy nods. “Well, she’s a _wizard_ with a post-it note, this one. Actual magic!”

“Right,” Vernon says, gaze skimming over Jimmy. “Do you have a schedule planned yet?” he asks Kim. “I set aside a couple of months purely for bar study. I know it can be hard to say no to having fun for that long—” a nod to the wine in her hand “—but it’s necessary, I believe.”

Kim stares at Vernon, her face a blank mask. 

“I might still have my old study schedule if you’d like to run over it,” Vernon says, after the short silence. 

Kim inclines her head. “Thanks.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great,” Clara says, glancing between them all. “Magic, huh?”

“Not quite,” Kim says. She turns to Jimmy, and she seems to study him. Her expression softens, her eyes shining a little from the wine. She touches his arm briefly and says, “But I have my good luck charm.”

It takes Jimmy’s brain a second to catch up with his ears, and by the time it does, Vernon is already talking again. 

“—good luck charm?” Vernon says, lip twitching. 

“Jimmy helped me study for finals,” Kim says crisply. And for a moment Jimmy expects her to make a joke about all the ways he mispronounced important case law names, but she doesn’t. She just stands there, face still a mask, eyes gleaming in a way that Jimmy’s sure only he can see. 

After a beat, Carl Vernon gives an short little laugh. “Well, well,” he says. “We’ll make a little lawyer of you yet, then, huh?” As he turns to the others, he thumps a paw down on Jimmy’s shoulder. “This guy! I still remember him on his first day—ran into him in the lobby that morning, like a lost duckling. Looked like one, too, didn’t you?”

Jimmy stares at Vernon’s hand on his shoulder. The simmering returns to his stomach, seething and hot.

“You had that tufty hair,” Vernon continues, releasing his grip, and Jimmy looks up at him. He’s staring directly at Jimmy for what seems like the first time in the entire conversation. “Like you’d waddled in from some park. And there’s me saying hello, no _idea_ you were the boss’s brother, I mean, look!” He points to Jimmy’s face. “Who could ever see it? Chalk and cheese.”

The finger drifts in and out of focus until Vernon drops his hand. 

“I hadn’t heard the rumors then, of course,” Vernon says loudly, really holding court now. “The prodigal son! Right, kid?” 

Kid? bristles Jimmy, looking at the man who must be barely five years older than he is.

“Of course, we’re not really supposed to talk about that, are we?” Vernon says. He sniffs, then exaggeratedly glances around. “But I don’t see Mr. McGill anywhere now. And didn’t we _all_ wonder what the great Chuck McGill’s brother was doing down in the mailroom?”

Kim lays her palm gently on Jimmy's back, then lowers it. 

Vernon looks between the other listeners, and seems to read agreement on their faces, because he grins and raises an eyebrow. “But we also all know case records aren’t as secure as they’re promised to be.” 

The words hang in the air. 

And whatever’s been bubbling inside Jimmy finally boils over, and he thinks: I could get you. It would be so easy. It would be as easy as blinking, as easy as opening my eyes. He feels acid burning at the back of his throat, the rising bile of a familiar mood. It’s an old mood, a well-worn mood, and he’s a little out of practice with it, but it settles over him like a second skin. Or like a shedded skin, found again. 

It’s the kind of mood that once upon a time would have seen Merna wordlessly sliding him another beer. Instead, he finishes his wine, swallowing tightly around the last grainy dregs. 

Someone beside him is still talking. It buzzes in the background. 

And he can feel Slippin’ Jimmy coming back—the _real_ Slippin’ Jimmy, not the grinning clown who dances coins over his fingers or bends cigarettes in half, but the guy who fractured his knee in front of an elderly woman’s porch just for a chance at a few hundred bucks; the guy who screamed at his own brother so loudly he couldn’t bear to look at him again for five years; the guy whose wife ran out on him—Slippin’ Jimmy, dumb and drunk and angry, always angry—

His vision tunnels, his grip tightening on his glass.

And the burning, unstoppable feeling rises, angering Jimmy more than anything else, angering him just for feeling it; angering him like seeing Howard reflected in the glass of the lobby, a kid pretending to be a king; angering him like Kim’s hand on his elbow—Kim, who hasn’t fucked him again since White Sands, and he doesn’t know why, and he thinks—he thinks— 

—what the fuck is wrong with these people, standing here dying in this room.

He looks at the empty wine glass in his hand. His knuckles are white on the thin stem. 

He imagines the fireworks the shattered shards would make beneath the thousands of Christmas lights. Little fragments of glowing—

—and his mother looked back, hadn’t she, had looked back for a split second before she closed the door, had looked out to him sitting in the back of the cab, her eyes glowing beneath the streetlights, and her lips had lifted— 

“I’m gonna go hit the head,” Jimmy says harshly, words spilling from him. 

He’s aware, suddenly, that he’s interrupted somebody, but he’s not sure who. He looks at the group, at the blurred faces of everyone, and then he turns and walks away. There’s an elevator, its doors already open like they’re waiting for him. He steps in just as they're shutting so that by the time he turns around they’ve closed, and it’s just himself staring back: mirrored and warped. 

Some asshole in a new shirt and tie. 

When the doors break apart again, Jimmy launches out of them, through the space where his reflection had been and onto the landing of the parking garage.

He pauses, breathing heavily—but there he is again, his red-patterned tie flashing on the curve of a trashcan—so he slams his foot into the reflection, slams his toes again and again into the metal until it bends and buckles, falling over against the wall. The blood rushes in his ears. 

He feels a hand on his arm and he stills. 

“Kim,” he hisses, not needing to ask. 

“I followed you,” she says, behind him. “Sorry.” 

The wine is drumming under his skin. He turns. It takes a moment for him to really focus on her. When he does, he can see the stillness in her like he would see movement in anybody else. Stillness like an expression on her face.

“Jimmy,” she murmurs, eyes soft. “Let me drive you home.”

“I talked to Howard,” he says, gaze trained on hers, his voice harsh and thin. 

Kim looks down at the trashcan beside him. “It went that well, huh?” 

“Yeah,” Jimmy says acidly. “Yeah, it went that well.” 

She doesn’t touch him again. She just nods, once, and then walks off towards her car, and Jimmy follows.

They drive. He can still feel the bile at the back of his throat, still feel the hot anger burning beneath the surface of him, still feel the ugly old skin that now clings to his new one like slime. 

He clenches his teeth. Kim’s music sounds discordant tonight, the lyrics inaudible and the guitars harsh and jangled. But he doesn’t touch the volume, just sits there and watches the darkened houses of the city go by, one by one, interminable. 

They stop outside his apartment building, and Jimmy heads inside without looking back. It takes him a few tries to get the key in the lock, but he manages it, and he’s not even sure that Kim’s going to follow until he hears the door open and close again behind him. 

He doesn’t turn to her, though. He moves to the kitchen instead and runs the faucet, splashing water onto his face, and then he stands there with his hands clenched on the edge of the sink. The room drifts a little at the corners.

He hears Kim move behind him. She lays a hand on his back, up by his shoulder blade, and holds it there. He can feel her thumb moving ever-so-slightly over his shirt. He can feel the cool water drying on his face, soaking into the top of his collar. He can feel the white hot anger beneath his skin, and he wonders if Kim can feel it too, burning through his shirt. 

Slowly, she shifts her hand downwards, grazing his spine and creeping into small of his back. He thinks he can sense her breath on his shoulder, thinks he can sense the presence of her behind him like a weight in the space. 

But he still doesn’t move. He presses the pads of his fingers tighter against the cool metal of the kitchen sink. 

Kim strokes her thumb back and forth again, up and down over the curve of his lower back, the movement making a soft noises on the fabric. Jimmy sighs, and gradually she trails her hand around his right-hand side, lingering for a moment in the dip of his hips above his trousers, and then shifting to his stomach. 

And he can see her hand now, see her fingers dancing gently over his white shirt. She splays them out, pushing her palm against his belly—and Jimmy suddenly feels the rest of her press up against him, her hips and stomach and breasts warm down his back. He exhales, one long shuddering breath. 

Slowly, she moves her hand up, fingers catching on and skimming off the buttons of his shirt. 

“Fuck, Kim,” he says, closing his eyes. 

“Shh,” Kim says, and she’s speaking right into his skin, breath warm on his shoulder. She shushes him again, and her lips press open-mouthed against his back, and then she starts to drag her hand down again, and Jimmy opens his eyes again to watch. Her palm is light on him again, barely there, moving with a quiet hiss over the fabric. 

She arrives at his belt—but Jimmy jerks around, facing her, grabbing her upper arms. 

Kim stares up at him intensely, eyes boring into his. She’s so close he can see the flecks of white in the blue of her irises again—the streaked, paintbrush clouds. Her brows pull together and she looks, he thinks, curious. Like she’s waiting to see what he does next. 

So he kisses her, closing the short distance between them quickly and inelegantly, their teeth clashing. Kim grabs his chin, pulling him closer, and she kisses him back just as violently, snagging his bottom lip and then releasing it. 

He digs his fingers tighter into her arms, but it’s still Kim who seems to pull him, to direct him, dragging him backwards towards his bed—and his apartment is so small they reach it even sooner than he expects. He slams his bad knee into the wooden bedpost as they topple down onto the mattress, and he hisses, rolling onto his back and breathing through clenched teeth. 

“You okay?” Kim asks, moving to kneel beside him, her brows folded with concern.

“Fuck,” Jimmy says. He pinches the bridge of his nose, the room tipping sideways as he closes his eyes. “Yeah, I’m—” But he doesn’t know what—he’s _good?_ he’s _okay?_ He opens his eyes and stares at her and he thinks—you never met this guy, Kim. You wouldn’t like this guy. I tried to bury this guy in Cicero, but a quick visit home and a couple of low-grade assholes and some drinks and now he’s come clawing back. 

He stares up at her, breathing heavily, losing himself in her dark and blown-out pupils. She trails a hand lazily over his stomach, back and forth, stoking him, studying him right back. After a while, she pulls her hand away, and just kneels there, staring at him. 

So, gritting his teeth against the pain, he pushes himself upright so that he’s kneeling, too, facing her. And he kisses her, hard and fast, breathing raggedly into her mouth. 

She reaches up and grabs the side of his face, her fingernails digging into the soft skin around his ears. Jimmy can feel the sharp points of the contact even after she lets him go minutes later, desperately moving her hands down to his belt again, tugging at it and unbuckling it. 

And Jimmy pushes her dress up frantically, too, bunching it over her hips; and he was right earlier, it’s so thin it feels like liquid in his hands. He rubs his palms up the side of her thighs and over her waist, pausing to dig his thumbs into the little dips of her bone for a moment. 

Kim hisses into his mouth and he laughs, pressing his thumbs down tighter. She bucks her hips up into his grip and then starts moving her own hands again, pushing at his trousers frantically, shoving them down over his hips, taking his boxers with them. She trails her fingers up the top of his thigh and then grabs him, sliding her palm almost painfully over his cock. 

“Jesus,” Jimmy gasps. 

“Shh,” Kim says against his mouth, tightening her grip, and he groans. She gives him another couple of strokes and bites at his lip quickly, then moves back. 

Jimmy stretches over to his bedside cabinet, trousers still down above his knees, half trapping him, but he manages to pull open the drawer and snag a condom with his fingertips. He shifts upright again, and Kim plucks it from his grip then gently pushes his hands back until he lowers them to his sides. They twitch there, small aborted movements, as he watches her roll the condom on for him, breathing harshly, his mouth hanging open until she's done. 

Kim lifts her hips and shimmies out of her underwear, kicking them away clumsily, and she grabs him again. She strokes him slowly, teasing him—too lightly. 

And she seems to sense it, because as soon as he finishes the thought, she lets him go again, and Jimmy hisses through his teeth, clenching his hands in fists on the bedspread either side of his knees. 

Kim lifts her palm to his cheek and holds him like that for a moment, scrutinizing him. He thinks she must be looking for something. He doesn’t know what to show her. He breathes out harshly through his nose. 

“Fuck them,” she says, crisp and precise, and then pulls him down. 

He kisses her open-mouthed, messily, digging his fingernails painfully into his own palms, hands still at his side, still not touching her. She strokes him lightly and teasingly over the condom, and he groans into her mouth, nipping at her and breathing heavily. 

Until, eventually, she directs him towards her. As he presses into her, Jimmy grunts, unable to stop himself from moving finally, grabbing her waist, his fingers tangling in the silky fabric of her dress, tugging her even closer with it. 

He closes his eyes at the rush of heat, dropping his forehead down onto her shoulder, pulling at her, fingers locked so tightly in her dress that soon his knuckles start to hurt and he has to unclench them. He trails his hands loosely over her breasts and her sides, sliding over the flowing blue dress like it’s ice melting.

As they move together, Kim struggles with the buttons of his shirt, fighting with each one before finally getting it open. She scratches her nails over his back beneath the fabric, sharp tracks of pain across his shoulders and down his spine—up and down, up and down, like electrical trails over his skin. And then, down at his hips, she tightens her grip again, pulling him into her insistently. 

So Jimmy drives into her faster, moving his hand down and swiping his thumb over the slickness between them and then rubbing it against Kim, steady circles. She bunches her hands up into his shirt, pulling him toward her, stretching the fabric, gasping open mouthed against his neck. 

Jimmy holds her head there with his free hand, fingers tangled loosely in her hair, driving into her harder and harder until he feels her clench around him and he squeezes his eyes closed and follows, choking. 

* * *

Later, Jimmy pushes himself off the bed and walks to the doorway of the bathroom.

Kim’s in the shower. The water makes a steady hiss, and he can see the shape of her moving behind the frosted glass. She’s fluid, and small—smaller than he sometimes thinks she is. 

He leans against the doorway. He can tell the moment she sees him there, though he can’t read her expression, just the tilt of her head and the subtle intake of her breath, barely audible over the rush of the water. When he doesn’t immediately say anything, she continues moving, reaching for his soap then rubbing it over herself in long careful strokes. 

He imagines the water on his own skin, running and curling over his body and down the drain. He can almost hear the sound of it. The slow bubble, and then nothing.

He clears his throat, a soft noise that he can barely hear. He inhales. “Listen, I’m okay with it,” he says sharply, and the figure in the shower stills again. Something simmers in him, pushing the next words to the surface: “But what are we doing here, Kim?” More silence, and he can't stop himself now: “You just wanna fuck every now and then and otherwise forget about it?”

Kim remains frozen. The curve of her neck, the glow of her hair through frosted glass. The only noise is the rush of the shower. 

It sounds like static. Like a dead channel. 

* * *

Later still, Jimmy lies on his bed, waiting until she returns. When she does, he drapes an arm over her, and she pushes her back against him and reaches for his thigh, pulling his legs up to fold closely behind hers. 

Jimmy stares into the curve of her shoulders and watches her breathe. 


	15. Christmas, 1992

The copier groans and then beeps again, somehow even louder the first two dozen times. Jimmy squeezes further between the wall and the side of the machine, wrenching his arm to manually turn the rollers, his shirt-sleeve pushed up past his elbow. Another beep—right near his ear now. 

“Is it okay?”

Jimmy clenches his teeth and twists his head to face back at Sally, Howard’s ever-diligent intern. “Not sure yet,” he grunts. 

“It’s just that Mr. Hamlin didn’t make copies,” Sally says, peering down at him. 

Jimmy nods. He reaches blindly for another panel and pops it open, feeling with his fingertips. So far just ribbons and wheels he’s sure he shouldn’t really be touching—and then his forefinger skims over the edge of a piece of paper. He presses his shoulder even further into the gap between the copier and the wall and strains until he manages to get a grip on the paper’s corner. And, knowing that somewhere Kim or a technician is grimacing, he just yanks at it, tugging it from between the rollers until it’s free. 

He closes the panels and shimmies backwards again, and then he stands, holding out the document. His hand and forearm are covered in ink, as is Sally’s original: Howard’s writing now illegible, the yellow legal paper stained blue. “Sorry about that,” he says, keeping the page held out until Sally takes it from him. 

“Uh, thanks,” Sally says, frowning at the notes. 

“Tell Howard to use carbon paper next time if his notes are that important,” Jimmy says. He flexes the fingers of his ink-covered hand and then glances around the mailroom. Decorations adorn the walls: tinsel and paper garlands and the words _Merry Christmas_. The balloon letter ‘C’ has deflated and now hangs shriveled and small between the others. 

Clara departs the mailroom after a drawn-out silence, and Jimmy watches her go. There’s nobody else down here: the others are all up delivering the last of the day’s mail to the few associates who remain in the office. Most of the HHM staff have already left at midday, off to whatever festivities they’ve got on for Christmas Eve. 

So Jimmy heads upstairs to the first floor men’s room. It’s empty and cold, like they’ve already turned off the heat. He squirts soap into his palms and rinses them under the faucet, sending ribbons of swirling indigo water down the drain. It bubbles slowly, guttering.

Jimmy watches it for a long time. 

The he shuts off the faucet. Catches himself in the mirror. There’s ink on his face too: a smudged line over the curve of his chin, and he wets a paper towel and wipes at it. Then wipes at it again, scrubbing harder and harder, little pieces of tissue catching on his afternoon stubble. He keeps rubbing until he’s sure the ink is gone, keeps rubbing and rubbing and then stops, breathing out through his nose. 

He tosses the wadded-up paper towel into the bin, where it lands with a thud. Frowns at himself in the mirror. There’s still a pale mark on his chin after all, surrounded by red and angry skin. 

Good enough. 

He unrolls his shirtsleeves and buttons the cuffs. The fingers of his right hand are ink-stained even after being washed: blue-black, like a bruise. He curls them over the ceramic edge of the sink and breathes out slowly. 

If only he had a pack of cigarettes. If only he’d taken the habit back up for real, instead of just sharing one with Kim a couple of times a week. 

He runs a hand over his face, pinching his bottom lip between his forefinger and thumb and staring at his reflection. There’s slashes of blue ink up his white sleeve, lines from where the fabric had bunched around his elbow but is now spread out, the stripes inches apart. Like defensive wounds. 

Jimmy lowers his hand. Shakes his head to shift his hair away from his eyes. Then he walks back down to the mailroom, passing a couple more people leaving for the holiday on his way. Bruce, who has reindeer antlers perched on his bald head, waves to him, and Jimmy raises a hand back. 

The mailroom itself is empty, just as it had been earlier, before Clara had come in with those curled-ended notes of Howard’s and set them carelessly in the document feeder. The offending copy machine is still beeping, but Jimmy ignores it. He hops up onto one of the workstations and grabs a rubber-band ball, rolling it between his palms for a moment then leaning back on the tabletop. 

He tosses it into the air, trying to get it as close to the ceiling as he can without it touching, without it hitting the square tiles and long fluorescent lights. With each throw, the ball lands cleanly back in his hand with a _puck_. He keeps time with the beeping of the broken copier. 

Eventually, he hears the others come back. Jimmy lets the rubber band ball arrive in his palm with one more satisfying thump, and then he sits upright again, his feet dangling off the edge. Burt nods over in greeting, and Kim hands Henry a box of outgoing mail and then wheels her empty cart back to the station. She locks the back brakes in place but lingers for a moment, crouched beside the lower basket. She takes something small and white from the metal tray. 

And then she comes over to him. 

Jimmy gives her a small smile. 

“Bit of a ghost town up there,” Kim says quietly. She stops in front of him, slightly off to the side. She’s holding something in her far hand. “Just the partners and some interns left.”

“Both ends of the food chain.”

“Yeah,” Kim says. The copier beeps. She folds her lips inwards and seems to study him for a moment, and then she holds out an envelope. It’s branded with the HHM logo. “This was in Howard’s out tray.”

Jimmy takes it. His name is printed on the front in clean letters: _James McGill_. The ink on the ‘J’ is smudged a little. Jimmy rubs a stained thumb over it—it’s dry now, at least—then looks back up at Kim. “Thanks.” 

Kim just nods slowly. She reaches out as if to touch him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she pulls her hand back and moves away, pausing as she passes the broken copier to flick the power switch off at the wall. The beeping finally stops.

Jimmy stares down at the envelope again. He knows without needing to open it what’s inside: Howard’s promised rejection letter, no doubt filled with the same kind of hemming and hawing that had spilled from the man himself that night at the party. Jimmy runs a thumb along the seal idly—not breaking it, just testing the edge. 

It doesn’t weigh much. Probably only a sheet or two of paper inside. He imagines sending it back to Howard unopened, but it’s hard to imagine that Howard would really care. It reminds Jimmy, strangely, of getting his report cards from school—of walking home at eight or nine years old with an envelope tucked in his jacket, an envelope he’d sneak into one of the storm drains on 49th Avenue instead of giving to his mother. A kind of formalized rejection he’s since done everything he can to avoid. 

“Jimmy.”

Jimmy looks up.

It’s Chuck. Chuck in the mailroom, ever the sore thumb. He seems tired: his tie loosened, a stray lock of hair dangling over his forehead. 

“I already got it, don’t worry,” Jimmy says, gesturing with envelope. 

But Chuck doesn’t even seem to hear. “Something’s come up,” he says, and he frowns severely at his watch. “Mom’s arriving at four.” He looks back to Jimmy. “Can you pick her up?” 

Jimmy freezes for a moment then says, “Uh—sure.” 

“I’ve written down her flight number,” Chuck says, and he retrieves a business card from his jacket pocket.

Jimmy takes it from him. The numbers and letters of his mother’s flight are scrawled over the office address on the back. He folds it up with the envelope from Howard and slips them both into his pocket. 

“Great,” Chuck says. “Thank you, Jimmy.” He looks around the mailroom, then tugs the sleeve of his shirt back down over his watch. “Just bring her straight to my place, will you?

Nodding, Jimmy agrees, but then he frowns. “I don’t have a key.”

“Right,” Chuck says. He pulls out a set and wrangles with them, finally slipping one off and handing it to Jimmy. “If Rebecca’s not back yet just—ah, let yourself in.”

“Sure,” Jimmy says, closing his palm around the key. “Is everything okay?”

Chuck exhales, and something close to a smile seems to pass over his lips. “We’re close to a breakthrough on Isaacson,” he says, and then he sighs. “Listen, Jimmy, I’ll see you tonight. And you remember there’s no gifts?”

“Of course, no gifts,” Jimmy repeats, shooting Chuck a thumbs up. He catches Kim in the background, her eyes trained on him, but he looks back to his brother. 

Chuck nods once more and then leaves the mailroom, making a bee-line for the stairwell. His jacket is all creased up the back like he’s been sitting in one position for a very long time.

Jimmy watches the door to the stairwell swing behind his vanishing brother until it stills. He opens his hand and stares at the contents. Pulls out his own keyring and slips it on between his front door key and the spare one to his old Cutlass that he still carries around. 

And then another key enters his vision: chunkier, with a black plastic grip. Held by a small, thin-fingered hand. 

Jimmy follows the hand to an arm and then up to Kim’s face. He chuckles. “Okay, what’s the game?”

Kim shrugs, and then says simply, “Borrow my car.” 

Jimmy gives another laugh, but then stills at the serious expression on her face. He glances up at the mailroom clock: coming up on three-thirty. Looks back to Kim. “You sure?”

“Of course,” she says, holding it closer to him.

“What’ll you do?” Jimmy asks. 

“I’ll get the bus,” Kim says lightly. “It won’t kill me.”

Jimmy glances down at the key. “I can bring your car back after.”

But Kim shakes her head. “I’m not doing anything this weekend. Just drive it in on Monday morning.” She gives him a small smile. “Hang out with your mom, Jimmy.” 

“Okay,” Jimmy says. There’s a long silence, and then he finally takes the key. “Thanks.” 

“It can be a bit sticky getting into reverse,” she says. 

“I know,” Jimmy says quietly. He slips the car key onto the ring with all his others, then tucks them in his pocket. “Oh!” He reaches into his back pocket for his wallet and cracks it open, then pulls out his bus ticket. “Here. Still got six rides left.” 

Kim takes it from him. “Thanks.” 

“Use as many as you like.”

“Sure,” she says. She turns to glance back at the clock, then adds, “You’d better get going. I’ll tell the others. I think we’re finishing up soon, anyway.”

“Thanks, Kim,” he says again, and she just smiles gently at him—the kind of small, open smile she’s only offered him a few times, and that he hasn’t seen since before the holiday party. He tries to smile back, but it feels dry and unnatural and he has to look away. 

So he heads to the elevators and rides one down to the parking garage. Kim’s dark blue Ford Taurus is parked in her usual spot, near the landing. He remembers walking to it with her all those months ago, ready to quiz her on case law for her exam, or her review, or whatever it was that’d had her so stressed in those early weeks of their friendship. 

Today, Jimmy stops beside it, hovering for a moment at the driver’s door before slipping the key into the lock and opening it. He settles into the front. Glances at the empty passenger seat beside him, and then he turns the key in the ignition, the car crackling into gear, Kim’s familiar music kicking to life on the stereo. He jams the gear box into reverse and starts to back out of the space—but he lifts his foot up off the clutch too quickly and the car stalls. 

It takes him another couple of tries before he gets the feel for Kim’s car, but then he’s pulling away, climbing out of the parking building and onto the main road. He’s not even completely sure how to get to the airport from HHM, but he heads onto the freeway and follows his nose and eventually the airport signs. The traffic moves smoothly, and the sky is clear and bright blue right down to the horizon. 

Albuquerque is small enough that it’s barely twenty minutes before the airport signs start prompting him to take the next exit. Jimmy shifts to the outer lane. His gaze flicks to his mirrors and then back to the road before him. 

Something tugs at his navel, whispering to him in a small voice. 

Another look to the distant exit ramp. Another to the vanishing road ahead.

He _could_ keep going. The wheel is buzzing beneath his palms, the accelerator solid under the sole of his shoe. The freeway goes South. To the border. To Mexico. Or he could turn off, could go anywhere at all: to Santa Fe or Vegas or even Arno’s bar, where Merna would take one look at his face and silently slide him another Old Style, the bottle stopping perfectly before him. And he would buy some new cassettes on the way, too: Buzzcocks, Nine Inch Nails, Deep Purple. Something different. 

And he would roll the window down and feel the snap of air on his skin.

But of course he takes the airport exit. He slows as he climbs the offramp to the overpass. Waits at the junction for the traffic to clear. And then he crosses the freeway, not thinking of the line of cars that continues beneath him, steady and fast. 

Jimmy parks up in the closest lot to the airport and heads inside. Travelers are swarming in and out of the doors, and gathering around the check-in desk like moths. He pulls out Chuck’s business card from his pocket and checks his mother’s flight number against an arrivals board and then follows the signs to her gate. Just landed. He waits nearby with his hands in his pockets, rocking on the balls of his feet. 

In the corner of his eye is the bronze statue of a man, tipped forward at almost forty-five degrees, holding onto the tail of an eagle. Behind it, Jimmy can almost see the departures board, the names of cities burned yellow on black: New York and London and Chicago. And it strikes him that for the first time in his life he could afford to board one of the flights, if he really wanted to. Could use some of the money he’s been putting away for a car. Could race up to the check-in desk like in a movie—get me your cheapest flight out of here, leaving today!—and he could wake up tomorrow in another city. Another country. 

People start spilling out of the arrivals gate, and Jimmy turns his attention back to it. Sluggish travelers, chattering teenagers, tired babies resting on the shoulders of their parents. A few business men and women, pulling grey cellphones from their briefcases as they walk, shoes squeaking over the linoleum. 

And then his mother: short between the other passengers, her pale green sweater so familiar he’d swear she’s worn it every day for his entire life, the wool never fraying and the color never fading. “Jimmy,” she says as she reaches him, and she wraps him in a hug, rubbing her hand up and down over his back. 

“Hey, Mom,” he murmurs. 

“It’s good to see you,” she says into his shoulder, and then she releases him. 

Jimmy lets go of her arms. “You, too,” he says. “Chuck had to work.”

“Ah well, he sent my other favorite son,” Ruth says lightly. She studies him in her sharp-eyed way. “You look tired.” 

Jimmy gives a soft laugh. “I’m okay. Let’s go get your bag, huh?” 

They head to the baggage claim. Even after all these months, the airport still hasn’t fixed the squeaking gear beneath the turning carousel, and the sound itches at the corner of Jimmy’s hearing as he talks idly to his mother—easygoing stuff: about how her flight went, about how well behaved the baby was in the row behind her. He nods along, hoping he’s doing a good enough job of listening, twitching his hands at his sides until he finally sees her bag emerge and he can grab it. He carries it out to the car, the air cool on his skin, his mother tucking her chin down into her scarf. 

He unlocks the doors and hefts the suitcase into the trunk, then closes it with a snap and climbs into the driver’s side. 

His mother gives him a look as she lowers herself into the passenger seat. 

“I borrowed this from a friend,” Jimmy says, clicking on his belt.

“It’s a good car,” Ruth says. She pats the dash. “Solid.”

Jimmy chuckles. “I’ll let her know.” He turns the key in the ignition and wrestles the gearbox into reverse then backs out of the parking space. Music starts up on the stereo again and Jimmy turns it down—just slightly, just enough so it’s still humming in the background. The cars are backed up heading out of the airport parking lot, and Jimmy struggles with the machine for a while before it accepts his ticket—but then they’re out, pulling onto the freeway. 

His mother is quiet, staring out the window to the slumbering line of frost-colored mountains. After a time, she points to them. “Coming to New Mexico, I always think I’m going to escape the snow and the cold.” 

Jimmy nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, me too.” 

The traffic seems busier heading into Albuquerque than out of it, people drawing closer to the city for the holiday. The woman on the car stereo sings, and Jimmy taps his thumb idly on the wheel as they cruise down the slow-moving freeway. 

“So this friend with the car…” his mother says after a while, turning to face him. “Is this the same friend my AT&T bill told me so much about?” 

Jimmy chuckles and darts a sideways glance to his mother. “Yeah, that’s her.” 

“Do I get a name?” Ruth asks. 

Jimmy peers up at the signs, looking for Chuck’s suburb. “Her name is Kim,” he says. 

“Kim,” his mother repeats. “Like Kim Novak. Very pretty.”

“Hah,” Jimmy says, and then quieter: “Even _prettier_ than Kim Novak.”

His mother makes a shocked noise, and he can almost feel her smiling. There’s a pause, and then she says, “Do you want to tell me more about her?”

Jimmy opens his mouth. Closes it. Taps his thumb on the wheel and watches the red brake lights before him. Stopping and starting with the traffic, off and on. 

The song ends and the cassette clicks off. Side over. 

“Uh, not right now, Mom,” Jimmy says, finally, into the silence. He sighs, and makes a show of looking up again at the freeway signs. “Don’t suppose you know how to get to Chuck’s house?” 

His mother laughs slightly. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.” 

* * *

“San Cristobal, San Cristobal,” Jimmy murmurs to himself, crawling along the road, eyes scanning the signs for the approaching streets. He didn’t get too lost—only overshot the freeway exit by one—and now he’s in territory he remembers from his bus route. Eventually, he and his mother spot Chuck’s street at the same time, and he pulls into it. 

There seem more people out and about than usual: walking along the sidewalk or busy with something on front lawns. As they round a corner, Jimmy sees a line of brown paper bags on the curb, spaced evenly. He lets out a little laugh—and then notices more along the other side of the street, and perched on the pillars of people’s gates and fences. Hundreds of them, all along the roadside. 

“Okay, what’s going on?” he says, quickly glancing over at his mother.

She smiles at him. “You’ll see soon enough. I’m an old hat at this, you know.” 

He raises his eyebrows and turns back to the road. “Okay…” 

The garage door is already half open as they approach Chuck’s house. Jimmy pulls to a stop, and Rebecca emerges from the beneath the roller, carrying a large plastic box. She nods her head to them in greeting, and Jimmy waves. He pops open his door and moves around to the trunk to get his mother’s suitcase and carries it up to meet Rebecca.

“You made it,” Rebecca says, shifting the box to her hip and giving him a one-armed hug. “Thank you. I’m sorry that Chuck couldn’t get ahold of me in time.”

“That’s okay,” Jimmy says, and he tucks his mother’s suitcase into the garage then straightens up. Across the street, a neighbor is lining up paper bags, and Jimmy frowns. “So what’s going on here?”

“Ruth didn’t tell you?” Rebecca says. 

His mother gives a coy smile. 

“Oh, you’re in for a treat, then,” Rebecca says. She gets Jimmy to pull the garage door shut, and then leads them round the front of the house, finally setting her box down on the concrete sidewalk beside another, even larger, one. 

This one is open, and Jimmy peers inside it. It’s filled with sand. He looks back up at Rebecca. 

She laughs lightly, and opens the other box. Inside are stacks the same kind of brown paper bag as he’s seen all up their street, these ones a little rumpled at the corners, next to boxes of votive candles. “It’s nice to reuse them,” Rebecca says. “Otherwise it gets a little excessive.”

Jimmy makes a little questioning noise. 

Rebecca’s faces softens. “They’re luminarias,” she says, turning to face the neighborhood. “It’s a tradition. We all light them at dusk. This is a real area for it, actually. A tour comes through here, goes right round the park.” She sweeps with her hand. “I’m running a little behind schedule this year, but I’m sure that with you two here we’ll be able to catch up.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” his mother says, reaching for the stack of paper bags as if she knows exactly what she’s doing—which, Jimmy realizes, she probably does. There’s a pinch in his chest beneath his breastbone. 

Rebecca lays a light hand on his elbow, and when he looks to her she shows him how to assemble one, scooping some sand into one of the sturdy paper bags and then nestling a candle in the middle of it. Jimmy follows along, slowly getting into the rhythm of the job, talking quietly to Rebecca and his mother. He fills bags, watching the coarse brown sand pile and settle at the bottom, until soon they have a whole line of them, and Jimmy starts distributing them evenly along the sidewalk, counting the distance between them with the lengths of his shoes. 

He checks his watch. It’s going five o’clock, and some of the other residents have already started lighting their luminarias: pale orange dots on the other side of the park or down the opposite streets. And he can hear chattering, too: the neighbors on their lawns, or maybe people from elsewhere in the city, come to look at the lights.

He walks to and fro, fetching as many luminarias as he can from where his mother’s assembling them, and then setting them down on the sidewalk or backyard paths for Rebecca to come along behind him and light with a firelighter. 

“How long do these last?” he asks her, as she dips the lighter into another bag and then straightens. 

Rebecca smiles. “Longer than you’d think. Depends on the candles. Some of them might still be lit come morning.” She lights another candle with a crack of the gas igniting, then smiles to him. “I made you up a bed in Chuck’s study, I hope that’s okay.”

Jimmy stares at her.

“So you’ll have to peek your head out early. See how many are still going,” she says, and she stoops to light another candle. “And let me know.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. He stands there for a moment and then catches himself, jolts himself back into movement. He measures out footsteps and places another luminaria. The paper rustles when he lets it go.

* * *

As night falls, the clear blue sky of earlier dims to a soft purple. Chuck arrives after dusk, just as they’re finishing up. He’s tidied his appearance since Jimmy saw him in the mailroom: his hair back in perfect place, his tie again a perfect Windsor. 

That evening, after their Christmas Eve dinner, and after the tours have passed, the four of them sit in the park outside Chuck’s house, surrounded by the winking luminarias. It’s mythical, almost, the soft yellow lights shaping the curvature of the suburb, like a neon outline of a place. 

Jimmy leans back against the park bench. Do all the candles make it warmer? he wonders, staring out at them as his mother and Chuck talk about Chuck’s new case, his brother’s voice uncharacteristically animated. So many tiny fires along the street. Giving the shape of it all, all the driveways and side streets and garden paths. They must warm it a little. 

His breath mists before him, glowing orange. 

Soon, his mother turns in, saying goodnight. Jimmy wishes her Merry Christmas and watches her vanish through the bright, square doorway of Chuck’s house, like the end of an old movie: the silhouette of a threshold. He watches as the lamp in the guest bedroom window switches off. Watches, too, the dark space that remains, as if he might still catch movement; or as if she might slip back to Cicero if he looks away. 

And then Rebecca heads inside as well, kissing Chuck on the cheek and patting Jimmy on the shoulder—and it’s just him and his brother, surrounded by the flames. 

The candles shift with the silence.

They look like the boats on the Lake Michigan at night, lights bobbing, moored along the shore. 

They look like the tall buildings up State Street, up Michigan Avenue, with their thousands of square windows that would flick yellow as the city darkened, as the air chilled and the sidewalk iced over. And Jimmy had always felt amongst himself there, beneath those yellows lights, had always felt like a piece in some great machine, turning up and over and over and up. 

And he stares at the luminarias now and they look like the lights of Albuquerque in the rearview mirror, driving up historic Route 66. 

* * *

Jimmy doesn’t sleep well that night, curled on the sofa in Chuck’s study. The room is black and quiet. Somewhere, a clock ticks.

He had found Howard’s letter in his pocket again earlier, before he turned in, and he’d unfolded the envelope and stared at it for a few minutes. It’s still unopened now, lying on Chuck’s desk across the room. Invisible in the pitch darkness. 

Out the window, he knows, the luminarias are extinguishing one by one. 

He hears the others wake early on Christmas morning, just as the pale light of dawn starts to pick out the edges of the furniture in the room. He doesn’t remember sleeping at all, but he must have, some snatched moments between lying there, feeling like he should be doing something, should be going somewhere, should be tearing something apart and walking away from the pieces. 

Jimmy doesn’t drink that day, even though Rebecca boasts another bottle of expensive Italian wine from her and Chuck’s travels. He watches it pour redly into the others’ glasses and grips his water tighter. Shovels his mouth full of turkey and stuffing and potatoes—all more traditional this time, to his mother’s unspoken but evident delight. 

Later, they watch Jimmy Stewart movies: _It’s a Wonderful Life_ and then _The Shop Around the Corner._ His namesake, his mother had said once, and he’s never known if she was joking or not—for Chuck to have been named after their father, and him the gangly Capra everyman. Hepburn’s second choice. 

They play scrabble around the dining table in the evening. His mother is much better at it than any of the rest of them, and Jimmy’s too tired to concentrate, the square yellow letters swimming on the game board. He picks at a plate of leftovers, but he’s too full from lunch, and sluggish. After a while, staring at the jumble of incomprehensible letters, he bows out, pushing his chair back, taking the others’ plates to the kitchen and then heading up to Chuck’s study. 

He looks at the foldout bed, still unmade from his restless night. At the lines of law books along the shelves: spines blue and brown and indistinguishable. At the old diplomas framed on Chuck’s wall; at the photographs of his brother beside the seal for the Delaware Court of Chancery or outside an enormous, columned courthouse in Colorado. 

There’s one of Chuck and their father. Chuck’s in a patterned sweater, smiling near the old diner on 49th. Jimmy’s never seen the picture before. He leans closer. There’s a garland in the window, and he can see snow in the gutters. It must have been taken when Chuck stayed with them over the holidays before he got his first clerkship. A few long weeks that Jimmy had hated, then, avoiding the house at all costs, eighteen and angry and unwilling to be around his perfect brother for more than five seconds, and he remembers it now like acid at the back of his throat because that was the last time—

Nobody took any photos the next Christmas. 

The envelope from Howard is still on the desk. Jimmy picks it up again. Turns it over. He slips his thumb beneath the seal and then stops. Squeezes his eyes tight. He hears someone moving in the hallway outside the study, soft footed, shuffling to another room. 

He opens his eyes. The letter is like a weight in his hand, and he slips it carefully between the fading spines of Chuck’s books, to be lost in the enormity of them all. 

* * *

Only Chuck is downstairs when Jimmy descends. He’s reclined in an armchair, a newspaper open before him. He looks up when Jimmy enters. “Mom headed up to her room,” he says. “I think she’s still feeling a bit worn down.”

Jimmy nods. “It was a nice day, though.” He moves to the window and looks out. The paper bags of the luminarias still line the streets, unlit. He hears Chuck rise from his chair and move around the living room slowly for a few minutes, then approach Jimmy’s side. 

Across the road, an old woman picks up her brown paper bags, slowly emptying them of sand. 

“Do we need to get ours in?” Jimmy asks. 

“Tomorrow will be fine,” Chuck says. 

Jimmy sighs. He looks at his watch. It’s barely gone six o’clock, but it feels much later. He can feel tiredness dragging on him like a weight. He looks back to the old woman, hunched over her line of empty bags. “I think I’ll sleep at mine tonight,” he says, following the woman with his eyes. “Change my clothes. Come back to see Mom tomorrow. Will you tell her?” 

But there’s only silence from beside him. 

Jimmy tears his gaze away from the window and looks to his brother. Chuck is staring at him strangely, a brown parcel in his hands, and for a moment Jimmy thinks it’s another luminaria, but it’s not. It’s rectangular and heavy-looking and so obviously a book that part of Jimmy wants to crack a joke—something well-trodden about his brother and encyclopedias. But as he stares at it, Chuck holds it out further and Jimmy, mutely, takes it. He looks back up at his brother.

Chuck opens his mouth. His brow furrows, and his lips twitch as if they’re stuck on something, as if they’re struggling against something—and then he turns, walking away. He vanishes around the corner of the kitchen, his dressing gown dipping into the shadows. 

Jimmy watches the empty place for a long time, the book clasped in his hands. 

* * *

Jimmy doesn’t see her right away. He pulls into a parking space outside his apartment, his eyes heavy, the car buzzing beneath him, the stereo silent. The engine stills as he shuts it off, falling to quietness, too. 

The present from Chuck is on the passenger seat. Jimmy reaches across and picks it up again. Turns it over in his hands, feeling the thick brown paper. He closes his eyes and exhales, then nods. Tucks the book under his arm and opens the car door, stepping out into the courtyard. Tall lamps bathe the complex in orange.

And that’s when he finally does see her: leaning against the brown wall beside his door, smoke rising past her and twisting beneath the outdoor lights. She tips her head to him in greeting. 

Jimmy walks up slowly.

“Hey,” Kim says softly. 

“Hey,” he says. “Merry Christmas.”

Kim smiles. “Merry Christmas.”

Jimmy looks down at the cigarette clasped between her pink fingers. Her nose is pink, too, and her eyes are so blue he has to look away. “You come to collect?” he says, nodding at the car. “Gonna break my legs?” 

Kim chuckles. “I figured you probably wouldn’t be home, you know,” she says. “But…” She shrugs. “Well, I just started walking down Lomas and then before I knew it I was running out of street.” 

“Jesus,” Jimmy murmurs. “How long did that take?”

Kim shrugs. “Depends. What time is it now?”

Jimmy looks at his watch. “Six-thirty.”

“About two hours, then,” Kim says mildly. 

He studies her carefully. Strands of blonde hair sweep across her face, almost invisible. “You okay?” he murmurs. 

Kim nods, looking out away from him, looking out toward the Sandias. “I’m good,” she says, eventually. “You?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. They stand silent in the cold. The book from Chuck is heavy under his arm. 

Kim drags on the cigarette and holds it, then exhales smoke beneath the guttering sodium lights. Her chest rises and falls. Her eyes shift to his. Her voice, when it comes, is quiet: “Do I need to apologize for something?” 

Jimmy stares at her. He can feel another question floating in the air between them: his own, still unanswered. But he shrugs. “No.”

Kim seems to examine him carefully. 

“Do I?” he asks finally, tone edged with something wary and blackened. 

She shrugs, too. “No.” 

“Okay.”

Kim takes another drag and then breathes out, slowly and carefully, as careful as her next words: “I missed you.”

Jimmy gives a small laugh. “I saw you yesterday.”

“Really?” she says, eyes sparkling. “It’s been that long, huh?”

He still doesn’t say it. The words hang there like paper lanterns. 

And, ignoring them, he silently opens his door, and lets her in. 

* * *

But Jimmy finds that for all of it he still can’t sleep. 

The sheets are damp on his side of the bed, and he lies on them, his eyes wide open, staring into the darkness of his bedroom wall with Kim’s arm slung over his waist. The only sound in the room is her breathing, in and out behind his head. Not even the usual traffic from the busy road nearby. Just the waves of Kim’s breath. He can still feel her fingers on his skin, her nails in his hair, can still taste her on his breath. 

He lifts her arm and slides out slowly from under it, moving inch by inch, trying not to rock the bed. She doesn’t seem to wake up. He slips on his boxers and moves to the kitchen then pours a glass of water at the sink. Drinks it slowly. In the half light from the streetlamps outside, he can see the square parcel from Chuck on his tiny kitchen table, lying beside the little cactus Kim gave him as a housewarming gift all that time ago.

Jimmy reaches for the book, picking it up slowly and taking it with him to the bathroom. He flicks on the light and starts to close the door, and then stops, looking out through the threshold. Kim’s asleep with her mouth open, twisted toward his side of the bed, her arm stretched over the empty place where he used to be. If he were still there, the line of shadow from the bathroom light would fall almost directly between them. It illuminates only Kim's outstretched arm and the top of her head, the ends of her splayed hair that seem to reach for him, too. 

He closes the bathroom door. Lowers the lid of the toilet and sits on it, the ceramic cold on his bare thighs beneath the edge of his boxers. He holds the wrapped book with both hands. The thick brown paper is matte and unceremonious and perfect. 

A long time passes before he cracks a nail through the wrapping. He tears the paper along the edge then peels it off, revealing first shining gold-leafed pages and then bright blue leather. Pressed into the leather is an illustration of an enormous sailing ship, and Jimmy pulls the rest of the paper off then flips the book over to the front. Swords and guns and castles decorate the title: _The Count of Monte Cristo_. 

Jimmy frowns and opens it, and a folded sheet of yellow paper falls to the floor between his bare feet. He bends down to pick it up. Unfolds it.

 _Dear Jimmy_ , it reads. _I hope you remember this as fondly as I do._

And there’s no name, but he doesn’t need one. He turns the paper over—nothing else on the back. Just those words, those—and he counts them—twelve words.

 _Dear Jimmy_ , he mouths, his eyes narrowing. _I hope you remember this as fondly as I do._

Jimmy flicks through the book, the text small and dense and dark on the page. He looks at the front cover again, then at the sailing ship on the back, then at the swordfighting men pressed with gold on the book’s spine. He scans through the pages, looking for familiar characters, finding nothing, finding only long French names with accented letters that he’s not even sure he’d know how to say. 

_Dear Jimmy_. _I hope you remember this as fondly as I do._

Something starts catching in him, like firelighter snapping, gasless, trying to ignite—and he keep looking, turning page after page, then back to the beginning—nothing—and then over from the top again, his fingers unsteady, thumbs shaking as he leafs through—and then to the inside cover, where he finally finds two more words: _Christmas, 1992_. 

The familiar curling ‘C’ and the looping ‘s’s of his brother’s handwriting seem almost to rise off the page, to swim before him in the haze of tiredness and candle smoke, and he stares at them for a long time, tracing them with his eyes until they’re burned into his retinas, until when he flicks through the book again he can’t even make out what it says, just the white-black rush of pages, and the fourteen words in his mind:

 _Dear Jimmy_. _I hope you remember this as fondly as I do._ _Christmas, 1992._

And whatever it is that’s been clicking and sparking finally catches, and Jimmy feels it rushing up through him, and he digs his fingers into the leatherbound book, and something breaks, bright in his chest, like a glass shattering, like pinpricks in his eyes—

—like a teenaged Chuck smiling down at Jimmy as they sat together cross-legged on the carpet before their old fireplace, listening and nodding and then saying, “Huh, Jimmy. I never heard that one. D’you wanna tell me it again?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "If you were one of the lucky few who reached that peak, even for a moment, if you made him proud, wow, what a feeling."
> 
> and to any curious, [here's how i chose chuck's gift.](https://jimmymcgools.tumblr.com/post/624992525031292928/a-deep-dive-into-some-nonsense-the-script-for)
> 
> thank you for reading and commenting!


	16. The Foothills

Jimmy exhales slowly, centering himself, steadying himself, and then he shoots. The cue ball kisses its target and sends it rolling ahead—to bounce off the edge of the pocket and back over the table, where it slows to a stop against the opposite cushion. 

“Jeez, Jimmy,” Kim says, “I really thought you’d be better at this.” She takes a swig of her beer, picks up her pool cue, and effortlessly sinks another ball, then grins at him, eyes flashing. “You sure you’re not hustling me, Paul Newman?”

“Yeah, just rope-a-doping you,” Jimmy says lightly. “Give it another ten minutes and I’ll be off to the races.” 

Kim looks up from the table again and quirks an eyebrow, and Jimmy smiles warmly. The row of pool tables stretches out beneath a low ceiling, the domed lights above them hazy with cigarette smoke. On a half-raised stage near the bar, a local band plays top forty hits, their stringy-haired guitarist thrashing the same four chords over and over again. 

“Think those guys are gonna take a shot at Auld Lang Syne?” Jimmy asks, turning back to Kim. 

“Can’t wait,” Kim says. She measures up her shot and sinks another ball. Then, straightening, she steps back from the table and makes her way to the other side, brushing past him and adding under her breath: “Two to go…” 

Jimmy folds his hands over the top of his cue like a staff and makes a contemplative little _tsk_ noise with his teeth. “Nah, I reckon I’ll turn this around.”

Kim just snorts, studying one of the two remaining striped balls. 

He lowers his chin onto the back of his hands and smiles again, staring vaguely around the bar. The long room is heavy with the noise of others’ laughter, of clanking glasses and excited chatter. It’s mostly UNM students, and Jimmy spots a few half-familiar faces, people he recognizes from his reconnaissance trip to the law school, or from that night at the mock Irish pub after Kim had finished her finals. He hadn’t seen many of her college classmates again until tonight—one of the lines that had been drawn in the white sands of Alamogordo and have since been erased by basement phone calls, by company Christmas parties and the blue vapor of the sodium lights outside Jimmy’s apartment. 

A glass shatters somewhere and people cheer. Jimmy rocks his cue back and forth slowly, still keeping his chin on top of his hands. He tries to imagine Chuck partying at Georgetown, going out with everyone after class—at least five years their junior, still too young to buy beer, and he wonders at the fleeting thought of his brother feeling as out of place over there as he has here in Albuquerque. Knowing Chuck, the feeling wouldn’t have lasted long. 

Across the hall, more of Kim’s classmates take up a spare pool table, and Jimmy searches his memory for their names—Steph and Cara and one of the Erics, who’s wearing turquoise polo this time instead of salmon. 

“What happened to the other Eric?” Jimmy asks thoughtfully, looking back to Kim again.

“Dropped out,” she says, still eyeing up her next shot. “The attrition rate this semester is…” She just grimaces. 

Jimmy props his cue against the table again and takes a swig of his drink. “Must suck to get so far only to lose it all.”

“Says Mr. Few-Credits-Shy-of-Graduating,” Kim murmurs. 

Laughter bubbles up in him, effervescent like the beer, and he shakes his head. Across the room, a woman is handing out dollar-store cardboard crowns to anyone who’ll take them, the numbers _1993_ sticking up from the headbands. Jimmy sips his beer again and pops his lips off the bottle, then smiles at Kim. “So, you got any New Year’s resolutions?” 

Kim flicks her gaze up to him. “What?”

“Not much time left to decide,” he says, indicating the clock near the bar. “Have to get them in fast, before the buzzer goes.”

There’s another loud cry from down at the bar, and Kim glances over in its direction then goes back to studying the pool table solemnly. She’s in jeans and a cardigan, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hair pulled back in a loose bun. Stray threads fall past her forehead as she bends over the pool table. Her brow is pinched in concentration—though real or pretend, Jimmy’s not sure. 

But he offers a little smile and relents. “Gotta say, my ‘92 was a lot better than my ‘91… ” When she finally looks up he grins wider. “And I think ‘93 is gonna be even better. I’ll keep on in the mailroom, keep on at HHM. Just stay on track. So I guess my resolution is to—” he darts a hand out in front of him “—keep riding the train! Straight to the station!”

Kim nods, shifting her pool cue a fraction.

“A full year in Albuquerque,” Jimmy continues. “What could be better than that?” And as the words leave his mouth, he realizes he’s said them without a trace of irony. 

“Yeah,” Kim says lightly. “What could be better than that?” She finally shoots, and the blue ten-ball bounces off the side of the pocket and out across the table. 

Jimmy makes a sympathetic pained noise but says, “Aha! The tide is turning!” He picks up his cue again. Chalks the tip. Stares at the table thoughtfully—at his orange five-ball where it hugs the cushion, then around at his others. He makes a humming sound, then looks back up at Kim. “You know, you didn’t answer my question.”

Kim raises her eyebrows. 

And Jimmy raises his right back. “Your New Year’s resolutions?” 

The band on the stage abruptly stops playing: a discordant ring of strings and feedback. There’s a few seconds of hushed silence before a delayed cheer, and then the hubbub of the bar slowly returns to normal. 

“Better hurry up,” Jimmy continues eventually, widening his eyes as he looks back to Kim. He jerks his head over to the band. “I think those guys are gearing up for the big number.”

Kim stares at him, and he doesn’t look away this time; he just holds her gaze, waiting, until eventually she speaks: “Resolutions?” She folds her lips inwards, then says, “I’d like to pass the bar.”

“Oh, come on, Kim, no!” Jimmy cries, slamming a palm down on the table. One of the pool balls rolls a little, and he quickly resets it, waving a hand dismissively before continuing: “Something real. Spill it. Clock’s ticking.”

“You barely said anything, either, you know,” Kim says. “You just talked about trains.”

“It was a metaphor!” Jimmy says. “I _was_ the train!”

“I understood the metaphor, Jimmy,” she says, lips twitching. “But it’s not like you bared your soul.”

“All right, all right, I’ll let it go,” Jimmy says. He laughs again and leans forward, eyeing up his angle. “One of these days, Kimberly Wexler, you’re going tell me more about yourself.” He draws his cue back, pauses and says, “And I’ll be ready,” then takes the shot. His ball misses the pocket again, but Jimmy just grins winningly, clicks his fingers, and holds out his palms: _ta-da!_

“Well, I’ll tell you this for free: you are very bad at pool,” Kim says dryly. She lifts her own cue, positions her shot for a few seconds, and then smoothly sinks another striped ball. Only one to go. 

The tenor of the room shifts, the mood tightening, the minutes closing in on midnight. The woman throws her remaining paper _1993_ hats wildly over the heads over the pool players, and they twist through the air for a few brief moments, casting shadows along the walls like birds. One lands nearby, but Jimmy doesn’t reach for it; he watches Kim takes her next shot instead. Her final striped ball rattles down through the pocket. A smile flickers across her face. 

Someone brushes behind Jimmy, heading across the smoke-filled hall toward the dance floor. Outside, the sound of gunfire rises, pops and cracks of people firing into the air, louder and sharper than the fireworks that have been going off all evening. Near the bar, somebody starts calling out a countdown, energetic and raw and soon joined by many other voices. 

But Kim’s still lining up her last shot with precise and careful movements. She stares down her pool cue at the eight-ball where it glimmers darkly on the green velvet. Her chest rises and falls with measured breaths. 

“You gotta call it,” Jimmy says, beneath the chanting of the crowd. 

She peers curiously over at him as if she didn’t hear what he said. Loose wisps of hair hang around her face, drifting slightly with the tiny air currents in the warm bar. Her eyes glitter beneath the smoky overhead lights. 

“You gotta call the pocket,” Jimmy repeats softly.

So Kim points to the back corner pocket, lines up her shot, and says: “ _That_ one.” 

* * *

“Kim!” Jimmy hisses. He points to the clock on the wall. “Look at the time, we gotta go. We gotta go.”

Kim glares up at him over her textbook and frowns. 

So Jimmy leans forward and snaps the cover closed with a bang that echoes through the UNM law library. A couple of students look up from their own books and sneer, but he rolls his eyes and waves them away. “Kim, it’s five, you’re off the clock, let’s hit it,” he says, pointing to the time once again. 

But Kim still doesn’t look at it; she just stares at him witheringly.

“We had a deal, remember?” he says in a little sing-song voice. 

She sighs. “Jimmy.”

But Jimmy’s gotten pretty good at reading the tone of his name as spoken by Kim Wexler over the last almost-year, and he can tell that this _Jimmy_ has fondness and hard-admitted eagerness beneath the exasperation. This is a _Jimmy_ that means, Yeah, okay, I know that I need this. It means, I’ve already decided to do this for myself anyway, and often it means, All right, you can come over to my place. 

Because Jimmy _sees_ Kim again now, really sees her, in a way that he’d forgotten how to for a while. He sees her coming closer and then pulling away again, like she’s testing the ice, stepping out slowly. He sees how her hand twitches at her side when she’s thinking hard about something. He sees how she pauses in her mailroom work now, for just for a fraction of a second, to stare at the door as if she’s already imagining herself out of it, a few months ahead of schedule. 

And he sees her watching him, too, when she thinks he isn’t looking. Studying him like a tailor taking his measure. Like a conman running down a mark. He can’t figure out what she might be looking for, and he thinks that one day he should just ask, but he enjoys the feeling too much to give it up: the eyes on the back of his head throughout the day. 

And, of course, he sees that without him closing the textbook for her, she would spend her entire thirty-second birthday here in the UNM law library, surrounded by towers of yellow legal paper as if she’s lost in a cornfield. Like she’s some crumbling old house on the prairie. 

So he plays her game right back. “Kim,” he says. He reckons sometimes that she has it better, that it’s a lot easier for her to inject tone into his two syllables than it is for him into her one. But it suits her, he thinks, much more than Kimberly. Kim: crisp and sharp but with a soft humming noise at the end, smooth and warm on his lips. _Kim._

And then she exhales and closes her eyes for a moment and says, “Okay.”

He slides the textbook off the table and places it on one of the collection carts nearby, and Kim packs up her notebooks. She folds her papers flat carefully and stacks them all in her briefcase, and it occurs to him for the first time to wonder if she thinks a backpack would look too childish as she carried it in and out of the glowing hallways of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. Not many of the other students around the library have briefcases. 

The Saturday traffic near the university is thinner than Jimmy’s used to. It’s a cool February day, and the clouds of earlier in the morning have slowly dissolved in the afternoon, leaving the sky clear and blue and enormous. It’s a short drive to Kim’s place, but Jimmy winds his window down and lets the cold air fill the car, the sun hitting his forearm with the tentative warmth of late winter, of early spring. 

“So what are we doing?” Kim asks, as she pulls into her parking space in her apartment complex. 

“You’re gonna love it, don’t worry,” Jimmy says, glancing around idly. He hopes that Andrea has cleared out by now. He suffered through an hour long conversation with Kim’s talkative roommate earlier that week, but finally managed to get her to agree to spend the night at a friend’s—though when he stopped by this morning, she was yet to show any signs of leaving. 

They climb the stairs and walk around the balcony in comfortable silence, and then Kim pulls out her keys to unlock her door.

Jimmy stills her, laying his hand over top of hers. “Just a minute,” he says. “First off, I need you to hand me that briefcase.”

Kim looks between the case and Jimmy warily, and she says nothing.

“Kim,” he says, just a short hum at the end this time, and he holds out a hand, palm up. “Come on.” 

Her eyes flash but she slowly hands it over.

It’s even heavier than Jimmy was expecting. He raises his other hand to indicate that she should keep waiting, and then he moves one apartment down along the balcony and knocks on the door. A few moments pass in silence. When he glances back Kim is watching him, half amused and half quizzical.

Finally, the door before him opens. An elderly man with a thin comb-over stands in the threshold, peering up at Jimmy.

“Good evening, Horatio!” Jimmy says brightly, and he holds out the briefcase. “Like we talked about?” 

Horatio nods sagely and accepts the briefcase from Jimmy. He mutters something unintelligible but friendly sounding, then slowly closes his door. The latch catches with a snap. 

There’s a sound of a chain being drawn, and Jimmy chuckles. “Good man,” he murmurs. 

“Jimmy, did you just kidnap my notes and give them to my kindly old neighbour?” Kim asks as he walks back up to her. 

“And he’s not gonna let them out again on pain of death,” Jimmy says, and then he waves a theatrical hand to Kim’s door. “Okay, you can go ahead now.”

Kim shakes her head, and she unlocks the door slowly, as if she’s worried what she’s about to see on the other side. But as she pushes it open, it reveals only her usual clean apartment—and, thankfully, no sign of Andrea. On the kitchen counter near the door, there’s the stack of Blockbuster rentals that Jimmy dropped off that morning. Old classics he knows she doesn’t have are mixed with some recent releases: _Death Becomes Her_ and _Patriot Games_.

“Happy Birthday,” Jimmy says, and he casts a hand widely around the apartment. _“Ta-da!”_

Kim takes it in, eyes narrowed, as if she’s expecting somebody to jump out from behind a corner. 

“I know it’s not a _tort law book_ ,” he says, dropping his voice dramatically. “But, Kim?” He waits until she looks at him again. “I got beer, I got tequila, I got bourbon, I’ve already ordered an absurd amount of Chinese food that should be arriving in—” Jimmy checks his watch “—about two hours, and I’ve got enough movies to last us through till the summer.” He grins at her. “Sound good?”

And Kim finally smiles. “Sounds good.” She lets out her breath and picks the first video from the top of the pile, tilting her head to read the sideways title in small font, and then she chuckles. “Sounds really good.” 

* * *

Jimmy leans forward and puts down his box of orange chicken on the coffee table and groans. “Okay, I’m done for real now.”

“You said that the last three times,” Kim says. She holds out a hand and says, “Mongolian beef?”

“Yeah, but this time I really mean it.” Jimmy tracks down the Mongolian beef in the mess of cartons and passes it over to her, then leans back and locks his fingers behind his head. They’re on their third movie of the night, but it seems like they’ve barely made a dent in his excessive takeout order. There’s even more boxes of unopened Chinese food in plastic bags on the floor, and Jimmy stretches and yawns then darts a glance at them. “Okay, done for now, anyway.” 

“You just gotta pace yourself,” Kim says, popping a piece of beef into her mouth. “It’s all about—oh, I love this part, shh!” 

Jimmy grins and scratches the back of his hair as Jean Arthur races back into the Senate. Jimmy Stewart, raspy-voiced, at the end of his rope, is swaying on his feet, and soon page boys arrive with bins and bins of telegrams out for him to rifle through hopelessly. He looks past the camera to the President of the Senate, his hair hanging in messy threads over his forehead and a despairing smile on his face, and Jimmy hears Kim inhale softly.

So he watches her watch the last few minutes of the movie. Her chopsticks are frozen halfway to her mouth, a piece of beef gripped between them, and her lips move almost invisibly around the shape of the dialogue— _I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don’t know about lost causes_. Kim’s let her own hair down, too, and it falls in waves over her shoulders, fragile and crystalline under the blue light of the television. When Mr. Smith grabs a handful of papers and throws them in the air, Jimmy swears he can see the shadows of them, birdlike, across her face. 

Then the film finishes, and she looks to him, and lets out a little breathy laugh. “I know it’s cheesy,” she says, after a moment. “But…” 

“It’s not that cheesy,” Jimmy says. 

She slowly lowers her chopsticks and folds her lips inward thoughtfully.

So Jimmy picks up his glass of water and splashes some his bangs, then brushes them loose over his forehead. “Like this?” He shakes his head like a dog and grins at her. 

Kim just snorts. “Terrible.” 

“Merry Christmas, ya old Building and Loan!” he cries, throwing up his hands. 

“Even worse,” Kim says, shaking her had. “I thought this was supposed to be _my_ day.”

Jimmy chuckles, then snaps upright. “Oh right, hang on! I was gonna wait until we were done with dinner, but I guess that’s impossible…” He laughs again, and then hops to his feet. There’s a brown paper bag beside the still-towering stack of video tapes, and he goes and grabs it, then drops back onto the sofa, crossing his legs beneath him. He holds out the bag and Kim takes it. 

She smooths her thumbs over the paper, revealing the name of a local thrift shop, and she lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything. Slowly, she unfurls the top, and then slides out a large pair of tortoiseshell glasses, the lenses cut in an old-fashioned cats-eye shape. 

“Like Judy Holliday in _Born Yesterday_ , remember?” Jimmy prompts. “I saw them and I thought, boom, that’s Kim. Can’t study the law properly without glasses.” He shrugs. “Plus it’s, like, a good luck charm.”

Kim looks at him sideways and smiles. 

“In case I’m, you know…busy,” he adds softly. 

She laughs lightly and slaps his knee. “I didn’t think you remembered that.” She unfolds the arms of the glasses and examines them. “I thought we said _you_ were Judy.”

“Did we?” he asks mildly. 

Kim twists on the sofa so that she’s facing him directly, then lifts the glasses toward him. Jimmy watches them approach and waits, not moving as she slowly slips them over his ears. His vision of her blurs out, losing all the fine detail.

She becomes just a gold-lined shape before him, triangles of blue light demarcating the contours of her face. 

And she’s still touching the sides of his head, her fingers light around his ears. She moves a hand forward and brushes his damp bangs over his forehead again, the pad of her forefinger trailing above his eyebrows. “It does look good like that, you know,” she murmurs, and Jimmy grins. 

And then the phone rings. It’s shrill in the quiet apartment. 

Kim slowly lets go of his head. 

“Birthday wishes, you think?” Jimmy asks lightly.

The blurred shape of her face shifts, and there’s a short moment when he thinks that she’s just going to let it ring, but then she’s rising from the sofa and walking over to her phone. She picks up the handset and answers it. 

Jimmy scratches his forearm idly, settling against the arm of the couch. Fiddles with his bangs again. 

He’s always thought that that movie was a bit _too_ saccharine, really, but through Kim’s eyes he can see why someone would like it. Can see the appeal of the articulate, emotional energy of Mr. Smith on that Senate floor, winning the gallery over with his well-chosen words. And it’s all still a performance, really, isn’t it? Just taking that honesty and making it visible, trembling and sweating, in front of the audience. 

And then the silence from Kim becomes noticeable, stretching out and out like elastic, and Jimmy looks back to her. He takes off the Judy Holliday glasses— 

—and she returns to crystal-clear focus before him. Her face empty. Unreadable. 

Jimmy feels like he’s coming back to himself, like he’s snapping back to reality from the hazy world of lukewarm Chinese takeout and Frank Capra and blurred contentment. He leans forward, palms on his knees. 

“Yes,” Kim says into the phone, finally. She nods her head once, abruptly, and it looks strange with her blank face. Like she’s a puppet. Then even quieter: “Yes.”

Jimmy tightens his grip on his knees, thumbs pressing into the dips beside his kneecaps. Something is sinking in his stomach and he doesn’t know why—doesn’t know why except for the cold uncanniness of the Kim who’s standing across the room, so far gone from the one who just watched Jimmy Stewart’s impassioned filibuster on the screen, who just smiled warmly over a dumb gift. 

And then completely free of any affect, Kim says, “Yeah, that’s great, Mom.” 

Jimmy hears himself inhale like it’s another person doing it. And now he wants to get up, wants to leave the living room and give her space, or wants to stand beside her—but he’s locked to the sofa, an unfamiliar part of him not actually wanting to move at all, not wanting to even breathe again. 

“That’s really great. I’m happy for you,” she says. She’s staring off at something in the middle-distance of the kitchen, gaze completely locked in place. “Okay,” she says flatly, and then a short time later, “Okay.” 

And Jimmy tries to find the layered emotions in those two syllables, to find the edge of worry or fear or love, but the word just sounds like nothing, like empty glass. 

She says it one last time, and then lowers the phone. Stares down to the handset in her grip, head hung forward—neutral and cut-stringed. 

Nothing about her seems to move at all.

But then she laughs, little sharp bursts of noise that hurt his ears. She puts the phone down and walks back over and sits beside him. “So what were were talking about?” she asks lightly, looking with mild interest at the takeout on the table.

“Kim,” Jimmy says. 

“Yes?” She reaches for a box of fried rice and poke around with the chopsticks. She frowns down at it, then lifts up a little bit of meat. “Do you think this is shrimp?”

And she’s staring at him now, and Jimmy hates how calm she looks, hates that if he hadn’t seen her reaction just minutes ago, he wouldn’t know anything’s wrong. A long silence passes between them and then he says weakly, “Yeah, shrimp.”

“Great!” Kim says, popping it in her mouth, and she looks back to the paused end title of _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_. “So, what’s next? Something new? A bit of Harrison Ford action, maybe?”

“Kim,” Jimmy repeats. 

“—or maybe we go weird, go _Brazil_ , bring on the late night with some Gilliam strangeness.”

And she’s not playing the game this time, so he leans forward and lays a hand on her forearm and says, “Kim. Do you just wanna get out of here?”

And something in her face breaks a little at this, a tiny hairline fracture over the surface.

He jerks his head towards the door. “Let go. Let’s bail.” 

The fracture spiders out a little further, but she says calmly, “Jimmy, I can’t leave Albuquerque right now, I have so much—” 

“We don’t need to leave Albuquerque. Just come with me.” He tightens his grip on her arm. “I have a plan.” 

* * *

So Jimmy takes the keys and drives, pulling out of Kim’s apartment complex and heading east, cutting through the late-night traffic. It’s a cold, cloudless night, the moon a half disc in the sky, and nobody's left on the streets outside the restaurants and bars.

He’s aware of Kim in the corner of his eye as he watches the road. She’s cradling the bottle of tequila and bag of takeout he pressed into her hands before they left, and she’s looking away from him, so that even if he faced her properly he’d only see the back of her head. 

It’s silent in the car for once, the stereo turned down, just the sound of the wheels over the road until he slows outside his own apartment and turns the engine off. 

“Wait here,” he says, and he darts inside. He opens his kitchen cabinet and grabs the bag he came here for, then pauses. Glances around his dark room, and walks through to the bedroom to pick up a couple of his old coats, too. Folds them over his arm and rushes back out to the car. 

He slides into the driver’s seat with his haul and twists to throw it all into the back, then turns to Kim. 

She’s studying him with amusement, eyebrows raised. 

“Okay, bear with me,” Jimmy says. “It might look like I don’t know where I’m going, and that’s because…I don’t.” He fights to get the car into the reverse then pulls out of the spot and leaves the complex, heading east again, following his nose towards the foothills of the Sandias. 

He takes side streets at random as they appear beneath the car’s headlights, until the well-paved roads and nice houses seem to suddenly stop, edged by beginning of the sparse, mountainous landscape. Jimmy coasts slowly past the cross-streets until he sees one that heads to the mountains, and he takes it, following it until it ends in a couple of parking spots and a metal gate that’s closed over the continuing dirt road.

Jimmy idles in front of the barrier, and turns to Kim. It’s hard to see her face in the dark, but he says, “That look locked to you?” 

“Hard to tell,” she says softly. She glances to him briefly. “You should go check.”

So he does. The metal is cold beneath his palms, but it’s not chained to the other end with anything, and Jimmy swings it open freely. He darts back to the car and drives it through, then closes the gate again, and then they continue on, following the dirt road as it approaches the Sandias. The quiet inside the car seems different, now, more deliberate.

Soon, they round a curve, and the lights of the expensive houses behind them vanish. Jimmy finds an area where the dirt road widens, and he slows to a stop on the side. He looks at the time on the dashboard, then points to it. “Ten minutes left of your birthday, we’re just in time,” he says. He flicks on the overhead light, and Kim’s face appears brightly before him. He holds out his palm. “Can I borrow a light?”

Kim smiles. “Long way to come for a smoke break.” She pops open her glove compartment and roots around, then hands him a lighter. 

“Whew,” Jimmy says, closing his fingers around it. “I didn’t actually remember to bring one. And that would’ve been a real letdown, ‘cause I did remember—” and he reaches over to grab the plastic bag he grabbed from his apartment “—these.” 

Kim’s eyes are fixed on him. “The fireworks.” 

And Jimmy laughs and opens the bag, looking in at the colorful boxes of fireworks he bought on their road trip so many months ago. “Yeah,” he says. “The fireworks.” He grins at her again and then pops open his door, stepping out into the dark and the cold, and he can hear Kim doing the same. It’s just bright enough with the half moon and the light pollution from the city to see the shape of her still, the shadow of her watchful expression as he opens the backdoor and grabs the coats. 

He throws on his old leather jacket and slides her the other one across the roof—an ancient, fleece-lined corduroy thing he brought back from Cicero after Thanksgiving, that his mother had pressed into his hands the day he left. That he hadn’t even seen since he was a teenager, and that still smells faintly of cigarettes and weed.

Kim shrugs it on as he walks around to her. It was always big on him and it’s enormous on her, the sleeves hanging over her hands. She tries to fold them but gives up, and just draws it close around herself, her hair drifting past her face in the light breeze, a half-visible smile playing around her lips—and Jimmy wishes he could go back in time and show his angry eighteen-year-old self this woman who’s inexplicably followed him out into the mountains in the middle of the night and is standing there in his thrift-shop jacket, the smile on her face becoming clearer and clearer as his eyes adjust to the darkness. 

And Jimmy turns and pulls out the first packet of fireworks from the plastic bag, cracking the cardboard open and sliding one out. He walks away from the car with it and then kneels carefully. Nestles the firework in the dirt and finds the fuse, then turns back to look at Kim. 

“If those rich people in their Sandia-view mansions call the cops,” she says mildly, “you better be right behind me, because I’m flooring it.” 

Jimmy laughs again, and he doesn’t say, Of course I will be, and he doesn’t say, Always. He just sparks the lighter and holds it to the end of the fuse, then steps away, moving back alongside Kim. 

The flame hisses up the fuse to the firework and then it’s off with a bang, cracking up into the sky and exploding in a shower of blue sparks that briefly illuminates the sparse pocket of dirt and sand around them, and Jimmy lets out a hushed sound and turns to beam at Kim.

She’s not smiling. Her eyes are dark and shadowed. “Pass me the lighter,” she says coolly, and she holds out her hand, and Jimmy gives it to her. She takes another firework from the packet and walks out to set it off, kneeling beside the lit fuse for a little longer than he did before stepping back.

It explodes above them in green sparks. 

So Jimmy leans back against the cool metal of the car as Kim sets off firework after firework, comet ones with tails that flash through the sky, or fountains of sparks that spray from the ground and spill over the dirt. Kim is always a dark silhouette in an oversized coat between him and the brightness, always closer than him, always backing away from each fuse at the last possible moment. 

The air fills with drifting smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder, bitter and nostalgic, and the lights of the fireworks are soon made hazy through it, made hazy through the twisting ribbons that hang heavy above the dirt and move slowly with the same wind that lifts Kim’s hair around her head. 

The gold threads snake over her face as she stares up into the brightness of the night. 

It’s hard for him not to just watch her instead, hard for him not to make the most of the flashes of colored light that shadow her face differently each time, getting caught in her eyes as she stares upwards, getting caught in her smile.

And they drink tequila straight from the bottle, and it tingles in his mouth as he watches her, as he waits for her to come back and take it from him again and again, her fingers always a lot warmer than his, like licks of flame over his cold skin. 

He bought roman candles, too, and Kim lights them in her hand, the charges exploding from the end like shotgun rounds, the sound echoing through the foothills. She fires some into the air right above Jimmy, and the sparks rain down on him, and he’s laughing and running out from beneath them, his hands over his head, and then the sound of Kim’s laughter is echoing around him now too, snapping through the air like firecrackers. 

And he feels her hands on his shoulders, patting out sparks maybe, or just touching him, but by the time he turns to look at her she’s already moving away again, returning to the stack of fireworks that traveled all the way to White Sands and back and have been sitting in his kitchen cupboard ever since. 

Kim burns through them all. Burns through them until there’s only one firework remaining, the largest one. 

She spends a long time nestling it in the sand. The flicker of the lighter illuminates her kneeling form, the blocky lines of the oversized coat.

Then the hissing trail of the fuse starts, and she stays beside it for so long that Jimmy almost calls to her, stepping unconsciously forward, but then she’s running to him; and she doesn’t even look back at the firework as it screams and whistles into the air and explodes in an enormous flurry of red sparks—but it lights up the edges of her, and she’s grinning this strange grin, and she comes up and presses him against the side of the car and kisses him. 

And the air smells like gunsmoke and ash and old cigarettes, and Kim tastes like it all, too, as she pushes him back, her hands on his chest, thigh coming up between his legs. She grips the lapels of his jacket and Jimmy presses a palm against the small of her back, bottle of tequila clasped tightly in his other.

The kiss is hard, almost painful, and Kim’s lips are so hot against his like she’s burning up—flames against his skin and still the scent of smoke, a lit black-powder fuse, scorching his mouth and his lungs until he can’t breathe. 

And then she pulls back. Jimmy inhales, gasping, watching her. She twists to look out at the darkness for a moment, as if hoping now to catch a ghost of that last firework, but there’s only the dissolving haze of smoke, until, eventually, she returns her gaze to him.

Some of her hair still clings to his own chest, like static, connecting them with threads. Her lips are shining and her eyes are bright. 

“Kim,” Jimmy says, falling back to the name yet again, to the sharpness and the hum. He gives a weak laugh. “Happy Birthday.”

Kim smiles openly. “It’s after midnight now, you know.”

And then it’s Jimmy’s turn to look out into the darkness. “I think we got until sunrise,” he says, and he smiles at her. He shifts his hand round from the small of her back, resting it on her hip, shapeless beneath the heavy coat. He presses it there for a while, then sighs. “Wanna tell me what that was all about?”

“Which part?” Kim asks softly.

He shrugs and makes a face. 

She moves, letting go of his chest and shifting so that she’s leaning on the car beside him, looking out at the darkness, too. In the distance, the yellow glow of Albuquerque hazes the edge of the sky, the lights of the flat city hidden behind the slight rise of the foothills. Dark shadows of clouds are visible against the glow, amassing far away. 

But Jimmy’s learning to read these silences, too, learning to read the way Kim lets them settle over her like water until she’s ready to break the surface. 

So he waits. 

* * *

“Which way is east?” Jimmy asks quietly, nudging his knee against Kim’s. They’re sitting on the trunk of her car, facing the rising black peaks of the Sandias. 

She frowns thoughtfully, staring out from where she’s huddled beneath the blanket—an old checkered thing she’d had rolled up in her trunk next to a cardboard box of emergency supplies: non-perishable food and bottled water and a first-aid kit. 

And a flashlight that’s tucked between them now. Waiting in careful silence for Kim to speak, Jimmy had folded up a piece of yellow legal paper he’d found in her car and stuck it over the bulb end, diffusing the light so that it’s like a glowing lantern between them. 

Kim finally points to the top of one of the peaks. “That’s east.” 

Jimmy stares in the direction for a few minutes, waiting for the light to change, though it’s still a long time before dawn. 

“They made me feel claustrophobic, at first, you know,” Kim says quietly, and Jimmy turns to her. She inclines her head to the mountains. “But I liked it.”

He nods slowly.

There’s another silence, and then after a long time she continues, voice slow: “We used to get these big thunderstorms back in Nebraska.” She’s still looking up at the Sandias, the yellow glow of flashlight pooling on her cheeks. “Superstorms. Enormous clouds on the horizon—just, unimaginably tall, Jimmy. Thunderheads you could see coming from miles and miles away, all purple and blue and gold out there. Nothing to hide behind.”

Jimmy presses his knee against hers under the blanket again and leaves it there. Kim’s knee is warm through his jeans.

“You could watch them, if you wanted, for hours. Slowly changing,” she says, and then she sighs. “But you couldn’t do anything to stop them if they were headed for you. You just—” and he feels her move closer, knee pushing harder “—you just had to wait. Wait, with the door closed, and hope they wouldn’t decide to come looking.” 

The flashlight lantern slips forward, and Jimmy straightens it, then looks back up to Kim. Her eyes are moving a little, like she’s reading, though she’s only looking out at the darkness. 

“I think she tried to call me on Christmas, too,” Kim says, voice soft. “But I didn’t pick up the phone.” 

Jimmy exhales sharply, and she looks to him and folds her lips inwards.

The silence that follows stretches out for a long time, for long enough that Jimmy goes back to patiently studying the Sandias, waiting for a change in the light, for the first hint of a distant dawn. He can last until then if he needs to. It’s warm beneath the blanket.

“You know, I wanted to ring you on Thanksgiving,” Kim says, finally, and he turns again to face her. She smiles at him gently. “It was some dumb thing I wanted to tell you before I remembered you weren’t home.”

“You could’ve told me that night,” Jimmy says, grinning. “We did talk. And some.”

She chuckles. Nudges his knee. “You know, I think I’d already forgotten by then.” She blows a hair off her face and turns away. “Anyway, that made me feel…” she starts, and then she frowns. Looks out at the shadowed Sandias again. It’s a long time before she continues, and when she does, Jimmy struggles to follow the thread. “There’s something so clean about this place,” she says. “The desert. Like it’s sterile.” She laughs lightly and grins at him. “I know that’s a weird thing to say.”

But Jimmy shakes his head. 

“It’s simple. Straightforward.” Her eyes soften as she looks at him. “It’s a good place to run away to.” And then quietness again. She tucks a stray hair behind her ear with a hand that peeks up from beneath the blanket. Catches his gaze. As he watches her, she seems to study his own face, her pupils dark, reflecting the fragile lantern. “You seemed different when you came back from Cicero. What happened over Thanksgiving?”

“Nothing happened,” Jimmy says. 

“Something must’ve happened.” 

Jimmy shrugs. “I don’t know why I felt different,” he says, eventually. “Maybe it was seeing Cicero again. Maybe it was just seeing Mom.” He breathes out slowly. The next question bubbles up, spilling from his lips: “Have you ever been back to Red Cloud?”

And Kim shakes her head. The movement makes a rustling sound against the blanket, and for a while Jimmy thinks that might be the only answer he’s gonna get, until she continues: “I hadn’t even talked to her.” She lets out a shaky breath. “Until this evening.”

The flashlight slips down again, and Jimmy straightens it. The soft yellow light shifts over Kim’s face as he nestles it back into place. 

Kim sighs, breathing slowly, long measured breaths he can feel through the blanket. “I sent her my number. But she’s not really the type to—I mean, I guess she’s _making amends_ now. Again.” Kim shifts, bringing more of her thigh into contact with his beneath the blanket. Then she looks away, and again her next words seem to come from some frayed, other thread: “I thought I needed that clean desert, you know. That sterile…” She lets out a ragged sigh. 

He hears the scrape of fabric over cloth as her chest rises and falls with deep breaths.

And then again another change, and Jimmy wonders exactly how much is swirling through her mind right now, for these different pieces to keep breaking the surface: “God, Jimmy, at the Christmas party, everyone was the same. The same conversation, over and over. They could’ve been having it with anyone—hell, they _were_ having it with anyone!” She gives a little barking laugh and turns to him, eyes flashing. “And the only time they looked any different was when they were looking at _you_.”

Jimmy frowns, Kim’s stare prickling over his skin. 

“Because you dared to not be exactly like them. And they’ll never see past that. Now that they know,” she says quietly. She lifts a hand from beneath the blanket, the long sleeve of his corduroy jacket hanging over her palm as she touches it to his face. 

He can smell the cigarette smoke of teenage Cicero days. And he can feel her, somehow, warm through the layers. 

Then Kim lowers it again. “And the next week, my phone goes. And it’s her. I just stared at the number on the handset until the ringing stopped.” Her lips tremble as she exhales, long and tremulous.

“But you answered it tonight,” Jimmy murmurs. He feels a clench in his chest. 

Kim smiles at him. “Yes.” She tilts her head and studies him, and the next words arrive like a shock, like something big finally coming up for air. “My mother got into a car accident one night when I was in Junior High.”

Jimmy stares at her, and she’s still looking gently back at him, soft and quiet at the edges.

“It was her own fault,” Kim continues, after a few moments. “Things were already pretty bad before then, but afterwards?” Her eyes are set and fierce, lit by yellow torchlight. “My mother had the doctor in Red Cloud around her little finger. Oh, you didn’t set the bone right. Oh, it’s chronic—oh, it _aches_.” Kim exhales through her nose. “God, it was always all so…messy.”

Her thigh is a line of heat against his, and Jimmy watches her in silence for a long time, watches her eyes follow the chaotic threads of tangled memories that are invisible to him, waiting to see if anything else breaks the surface again, if anything else peeks through. 

Nothing does. 

Her gaze is black, and heavy, and when the flashlight slips again, he doesn’t reset it. He just lets Kim’s shadowed face remain beside him as they both stare out at the dark line of the Sandias, watching for the moment when morning crests the distant peaks. 

“Which way is east again?” Jimmy asks at some point, voice soft. 

And Kim points, fingers small beneath the sleeve of his coat. “ _That_ way.” 


	17. Morning Over the Sandias

Jimmy turns off the faucet, and the last of the water gutters slowly down the drain. He dries his hands then lobs the paper towel toward the trashcan—and _sinks it_ and grins, and his reflection grins back, bright and crinkle-eyed. 

And Jimmy pauses, watching himself. He reaches up and runs his fingers through his bangs. Pushes them back from his forehead, examining the receding peaks of his hairline. Runs his tongue over his teeth and smiles again, more studied this time. 

“Jimmy,” he murmurs, turning his head a little, still smiling. “Jimmy McGill.”

He taps his palms on the edge of the sink—one-two-three. 

A toilet flushes, and a man steps out of one of the cubicles, politely ignoring him. Jimmy shakes his head to settle his bangs back into place, then leaves, back out into the busy restaurant. 

It’s loud with laughter and chatter, and Jimmy tips an imaginary hat to one of the many portraits of John Wayne that he passes on his way back to the table, the old actor nestled between haphazardly-hung tapestries and desert landscapes. Kim’s sat beside another of the smiling cowboys, her back to Jimmy as he approaches and her head propped on her hand. Her hair is up in a half ponytail but still falls in waves over her shoulders beneath it, and the tips of her ears peek out from beneath the gold. 

“Hey, so you know how the bathrooms here—oh.” And Jimmy stops, smirking. 

Kim’s asleep: her mouth open, cheek squished upward by her palm. 

He slides into the booth opposite her and watches her for a moment. Most people look peaceful in sleep, but not Kim—not right now. Her brow is still slightly furrowed, her eyelids twitching. Dogs dream of chasing rabbits, but Kim, he thinks, Kim dreams of standing before a jury and clearly and articulately convincing them to save a lost cause. 

He reaches forward and lays a hand on her upper arm, and she starts awake. “Jimmy?” she says, blinking at him. 

“Kim,” he says somberly. He lets go of her arm and leans back again. And then in a slightly darker voice than normal: “It’s 2003. You’ve been asleep for ten years.”

Kim gives a soft smile. “Huh,” she says, and she peers out at the restaurant. “And we’re still here, are we?”

Jimmy glances around too. “Yeah, we’re still here.”

“Wow, and the rest of my food, too,” Kim says, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise as she looks down at her plate. She picks up her burger with both hands as if she’s going to take another bite, but after a moment she just sets it down again and sighs. 

“I’m surprised you managed to drift off at all with that group right behind you,” Jimmy says, and he inclines his head to a nearby booth of women—who burst into booming laughter as if on cue. 

Kim taps the sheet of notes lying beside her plate. “Never underestimate the powers of the Uniform Commercial Code.” 

“Well, I try my best not to,” Jimmy says lightly, and then they fall silent for a while. Jimmy eats the last of his fries, chewing slowly and idly watching an arguing couple a few tables down. The man looks frazzled and on edge, and the woman just looks bored with the whole thing, delivering each of her responses with tired perfunctoriness. Jimmy pinches his straw between his fingers and sips his drink. 

There’s a crinkle of paper as Kim tucks the next sheet of her legal pad behind the others. She blinks, and her eyes stay closed for longer than normal before she snaps them back open. 

“You okay?’ Jimmy asks, voice gentle.

Kim nods once. “Of course.”

“Right,” he says. 

The nearby women laugh loudly again. They’re celebrating a birthday, Jimmy thinks, focusing all their attention on one person, though there’s no gifts or cake. Across from them, another group of women seem to have cast themselves in the opposite role, and they sit silently, picking at their food. 

He turns back to Kim, and points to her burger, still half finished. “Wanna just take the rest back?” 

“You sure?” Kim asks, but she’s already reaching for her papers to tidy them away, flicking the notepad back round to the beginning. “I’m done, anyway.” 

“Yeah, let’s go,” Jimmy says. “I feel like watching an old Western now, no idea why…” 

Kim chuckles softly. “All right,” she says, sliding out of the booth and eclipsing John Wayne’s smiling face. “Twist my arm.”

And it doesn’t take much—though she keeps studying through _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_ of course, leaning against the headboard on the bed beside him with her knees up, marking key phrases in an enormous bundle of printouts with a yellow highlighter. She looks up at the film during the good parts, and Jimmy hasn’t seen it before, or at least he doesn’t remember it, so he lets himself get sucked into the story until it’s time to rewind the tape, to eject it from his new VHS player and tuck it back into the Blockbuster box. 

John Wayne’s blue-eyed replacement is Jay Leno, the talk show host grinning out from the tiny television set. Jimmy settles back down on the bed, careful not to jostle the legal textbooks that pile on the mattress around Kim’s feet. They’ve been shifting closer and closer to her as the evening’s worn on, as she continually picks them up to reference and then discards them again. 

Leno wraps up his opening monologue, and Jimmy sighs. There was a time, once, when his father would shake him awake late at night, would sneak him downstairs on tiptoed feet because Carson was doing the Tea Time Movie (and Jimmy, in his best impression, would quote along, “Oh, are we back already?”) or because Albert Brooks was on with another stand-up set, angrily shoving a pie in his own face and shouting at the audience. The two of them would sit beside each other in the living room, lit only by the buzzing light of the television, shaking with wheezing laughter but trying to keep quiet—because it had always felt like a secret, back then, had always felt conspiratorial, though Jimmy wonders now if his mother really knew. 

It was the only time he’d ever seen his father laugh like that. Those magical midnight hours with El Mouldo and Carnac. 

Kim flicks back another page in her sheaf of papers, then lowers her left hand and rubs the knuckle of her forefinger over the bare skin beneath the edge of his shorts. Her brow pinches tightly as her gaze flickers over the text on her lap.

With another stinker of a joke, Leno cuts to commercial. Jimmy watches a few of them roll, then turns to her. “Whatcha working on?” he asks mildly, glancing down at the tiny font. 

She makes a humming noise. “Final paper for that criminal procedure course,” she says. “Reading over this appeals decision.” She highlights another line. “Cops used the new protective sweep exception from that Supreme Court case.” 

“That the one with the pizza thief in the red tracksuit?”

“Mmm,” Kim says. She sighs, long and drawn out, then leans back. Rolls her head from side to side. “After this I just have another—oh, twenty thousand papers left to write.”

Jimmy chuckles. “All in a day’s work.”

“You know it,” Kim says quietly. She rubs her eyelids.

“So what’re you gonna do with yourself when it’s all done?” Jimmy asks. “I mean, no more studying after the bar, right?”

She turns her head to him and sighs. “Yeah, real cases then. Or all the grunt work the partners don’t want to do, anyway.” She flicks over another page, highlighter wedged between two fingers. “This isn’t so bad, though. Least I’m not napping over a green chile cheeseburger.”

“Hah,” Jimmy says quietly.

Then her highlighter whispers over the paper, and Leno starts up again, so Jimmy looks back to the television. The first guest tonight is someone he doesn’t recognize, some actor with big hair who’s gesturing confidently, and Jimmy’s gaze wanders, over the stack of Blockbuster rentals on the floor beside the TV cabinet, over his open wardrobe, where his shirts hang like empty shells. The studio audience laughs perfunctorily, and Jimmy thinks about just switching it off, but the remote’s over on the cabinet, out of reach. 

Eventually, Kim turns the last page in her stapled printout and then tosses it to the side. It lands among the mess of textbooks.

“So, anything interesting from tonight’s batch?” Jimmy asks, raising his eyebrows. 

Kim sighs. “Oh, just the continued erosion of the Fourth Amendment, but what’s new? Least it gives me something to write about.” She rubs her knuckle over the side of his hamstring again. “What about you, anything interesting?”

“Nah,” he says, and he gestures to the television. “This new guy still sucks.”

Kim chuckles, and she looks down between them. She smooths the back of her forefinger up the thin surgical scar that runs around the outside curve of his knee. “Doesn’t hurt if I do this, does it?” she murmurs, stroking it. 

“Nah,” Jimmy says again, watching her hide and reveal the scar tissue. 

She still lifts her hand away, glancing over to the stack of papers. He hears her exhale, long and measured. But then instead of reaching for another batch of notes, she turns, twisting her legs out from her fortress of books and laying them over his own. She tilts her head sideways against the headboard and closes her eyes, chest moving slowly. 

Jimmy rests his hand on her thigh. It’s warm through the cotton of her pajamas, and he outlines one of the little animals on the fabric. “So, c’mon. Really. How’re you gonna celebrate when you’re done with it all? Fly to Belize, sunbathe on the beaches, bottomless margaritas?” 

Kim snorts, eyes still closed. “Yeah. I’ll go to Belize with mailroom money.”

“Okay, your first big paycheck, then,” Jimmy says, circling his finger around a tiny giraffe on her leg. “You’ve just defended your first wrongfully-accused teen. Saved them from a murder rap. What do you do?” 

“You mean after the city finishes building that statue of me outside the courthouse?”

Jimmy chuckles. “Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t want to miss that. Big plaque at the bottom. Kimberly Wexler: People’s Champion.” He traces another animal, a tiger that’s running over the curve of her knee. “Kimberly… what’s your middle name?” 

Kim hesitates for a long moment, then says, “I don’t have one.”

Jimmy nods. “Kimberly No-Middle-Name Wexler,” he says softly. “Champion of the People.” He runs his thumb over the tiger’s tail. “So, the ribbon-cutting ceremony’s just finished, what do you do then? Belize time?” 

Kim smiles, her eyes still closed. She nestles against the headboard, tucking a pillow up beneath her head. After a while, she murmurs, “You mean after they’ve thrown the parade?” 

And Jimmy chuckles. “Right, the parade.” He continues to stroke his thumb slowly over her leg, and he talks about what else would be in the parade, the route it would take, the big musical numbers and colorful floats, and then, of course, the biographical film about her life—and with each detail he waits for Kim’s quiet responses, which come at longer and longer intervals as the conversation goes on. 

Leno bleeds into Letterman and eventually Bob Costas, the chatter on the television consistent and reliable. Outside, the traffic on the road quietens. The silent, small hours of the night. 

“…Okay, but after that, and after they’ve renamed the moon in your honor, what next?” Jimmy murmurs, and he looks to where Kim’s tucked between his shoulder and the headboard, her neck cricked, body folded towards him. “Kim?” he whispers, squeezing her leg gently, but there’s no reply. He stares down at her, at the tension in her forehead and eyebrows. 

He thinks of her reclining on a beach somewhere, the sun on her skin, surrounded by white sand. Somewhere far away from the beeping copy machines of HHM, from the suited men and women who move through the upper floors so efficiently. Far away from lecture theaters, from law libraries, from yellow highlighters and yellow legal paper. 

Sipping some bright-colored drink and smiling. 

A loud jingle sounds on the television and jerks him from his reverie, and he exhales. After a moment, he slowly lifts Kim’s legs up and eases out from beneath them.

She stirs, twisting her head down into the pillow and away from the light, and Jimmy pauses until she's still again. Then he moves off the bed and gets the remote and kills the TV. Collects up all the textbooks from the bed and stacks them on the floor nearby. Flicks off the light and finally slides back into the bed. 

“Mrph,” Kim says into the pillow as he jostles the mattress. She twists her head to look up at him. “It morning already?”

“No,” Jimmy whispers. “Go back to sleep.” He slips under the covers, and Kim shifts, pulling them over herself, too. 

And Jimmy lies there, facing the wall, eyes open to the darkness. Not tired at all, his mind turning and turning.

He wonders what he’s doing. He wonders how he got to this place. And not just Albuquerque, not the relatively straightforward roadmap of Chicago sunroof to Cook County Prison to Hamlin, Hamlin McGill; but here, in this bed, with Kim.

He wonders how she ended up here behind him, years after twisting down the Sandias, alone in her beat up car, looking for someplace clean and empty.

Looking for a land without storms. 

At some point, she wakes up again, and moves closer. Her left arm worms beneath his pillow and he shifts to make room for it, lifting his head and then settling back down. She presses a kiss to the sensitive skin on the back of his neck and then tucks her face down between his shoulder blades, wrapping her other arm over him tightly, tighter than usual. He can feel her breathing, her knees pressed up close behind his, her chest against his back. Her heartbeat seems to pulse through his skin.

If he didn’t know better, he’d feel like the Sandias, like a line of protection between her and the world.

* * *

But he does know better. 

“That’ll be you soon,” Jimmy says, as he watches Chuck and Howard vanish around a corner, silhouetted darkly against the bright windows. Other associates drift in their wake like pilot fish: the unstoppable pull of a victorious Charles McGill. 

“Yup,” Kim says, finally. There’s another beat, and then she turns to him and smiles, her eyes flashing. “Okay. See you later, Jimmy.”

He nods and smiles back. “See ya.” 

And Kim is a beacon of color between the grey cubicles of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. A bright spot of clarity until she, too, is gone, her green cardigan dipping around a corner, her hair flashing one last time with gold. 

But Jimmy can still hear her long after she vanishes, mailcart wheels thundering over the carpeted floor. 

* * *

The door opens easily. 

And for all of it, for all the study help and quizzing, Jimmy’s never actually been inside the HHM library. It’s a small room, the walls lined with bookshelves, the dark spines rising monolithically, glowing beneath a reverent light. 

He steps over the threshold. Lets the door drift gently closed behind him. It blocks out the sound of the office, leaving just an empty-aired silence. A hush. 

And in the silence he watches himself, like a stranger on a screen. He sees a thirties guy in a short-sleeved button-up, standing before the dark shelves like a tourist. A guy who reaches for the books and pulls one out almost at random. Who lets it fall open in his hands, stares down at it like it’s going to stare back. 

Jimmy flicks through the pages slowly. They’re pristine, not marked with Post-It notes or pencil underlinings, not bent or folded. At the top, some words: _Negligence,_ and _Breach of Duty,_ and _Proof of Breach_ , black and sharp on the white. 

They remind him of Michigan Avenue in the winter: the wrought-iron lampposts that lined the snow-covered sidewalk. The square-windowed skyscrapers that towered above him, and beside him the bare-limbed trees, their boughs dusted in snow. The patches of ice that caught the yellow of the lamps, glistening like puddles. 

And everything so still. Everything waiting. 

Jimmy remembers playing with Marco when they were little kids, laughing and training to be stuntmen. He remembers dropping out of the tree in Marco’s backyard and dive-rolling over the grass, or leaping from the tool shed, or asking Marco to throw another fake punch so that Jimmy could hurl himself one more time into the fence and then collapse dramatically to the dirt. 

He remembers teaching Marco how to cushion a landing, parroting some bullshit theories he’d invented after watching Buster Keaton movies with his mother. Marco had even sprained his wrist one afternoon trying to do a stunt in his uncle’s living room, and maybe that was why he’d never been as interested in the slip and falls—not like the other scams, not like the colorful ones that let them talk their way out of trouble. Marco had always just frowned when Jimmy sat up at the bar at Arno’s with an icepack pressed somewhere, cash in his hands and shit-eating grin frozen on his face, and Jimmy had tried to ignore him. 

As he slowly flicks through the pages of the tort law book, he remembers that ice, cold and sharp on his bones. 

* * *

It’s a hard feeling to shake as he returns to his mail cart, glancing again at his watch, wondering if they’re missing him down in the mailroom yet, if they’re already drowning in discovery. The chill of the ice clings to him as he wheels the cart forward—and with it the familiar anticipation, the desire to do it all again. The tension of Michigan Avenue on a winter night. Potential pulled back and waiting to be released. 

He hears his name, and blinks, turning back down the hallway. 

It’s Hamlin Senior. He approaches Jimmy, cane thudding over the carpet, and he offers a warm smile. He’s looking for Chuck.

“I think he’s in Howard’s office,” Jimmy says, gesturing vaguely in the right direction. 

“Wonderful,” Hamlin says. He’s wearing an overcoat, long and beige and still tied at the waist. He catches Jimmy looking at it and smiles. “Not staying long today,” he says. “I just stopped by to offer my congratulations about Isaacson.” 

“Right,” Jimmy says, relieved he recognises the name now. “Yeah, Chuck really hit it out of the park with that one, huh?” 

“As always,” Hamlin says warmly, fingers tightening as he leans on his cane.

And in the lull the follows, Jimmy can suddenly hear the rasp of the Hamlin’s breath, the heavy way he’s inhaling through his nose. The way he’s drifting on his feet a little, despite the knuckled grip on his stick. Jimmy waits patiently beside the older man, his hands resting on the bar of his mail cart, looking around at the empty walls as if there’s something of interest there that they’ve both stopped to study. 

“So,” Hamlin says eventually, still a little breathless, “Once upon a time, I would have asked how you were settling in, but I suppose we’re past that, aren’t we?” 

Jimmy gives a weak laugh. “Yeah, guess so.” 

“How long’s it been?” Hamlin asks. 

Jimmy frowns. It’s been—God, it’s been a _year_ , he thinks. Almost to the day. A year of mail deliveries and photocopiers and lever-arch files. 

“That long, eh?” Hamlin says, evidently reading something in Jimmy’s expression. “I find Albuquerque does that to a person. Just tricks you into staying here forever.” He breathes steadily and looks around him, then says, “You never told me what you thought of the tramway.” 

Jimmy makes a little grimacing face. “I still haven’t been.” 

“Well, there you are then,” Hamlin says, voice suddenly brighter. He taps his cane. “Been here so long, but there’s still something left to look forward to.” He gives a crinkled smile, then breaks eye contact, glancing down the hall. “Howard’s office, you said?” 

Jimmy nods, and George Hamlin heads off down the corridor, moving slowly, cane thudding alongside him. 

* * *

Later, at the end of the day, Jimmy stands, watching Kim from the doorway of the breakroom.

She’s staring inside her locker, her lips folded inward in thought. 

The fluorescent bulbs flicker above her. The thin blue light of them washes her out, drains the color from her skin. Darkens the shadows beneath her eyes. 

On the inside of her open locker door is a square of pink paper: a drawing of a woman in a graduation cap and gown. A smile on her face. A gavel in her hand. 

The Honorable Kim Wexler. 

* * *

Later still, at the bottom of the Sandia Peak Tramway, Jimmy stands alone. 

It’s early evening, just before twilight, and there’s a chill in the air, a slow wind that whispers through his jacket. He’s in line outside the ticket building, waiting for the tram. It’s a short queue, just a few tourists around him, all talking softly between themselves. Young friends on a road trip, heading to Texas tomorrow. A couple on their honeymoon. 

The tram approaches slowly. It arrives at the platform and empties of passengers, more people coming down than going up. 

Jimmy steps on board. The floor rocks beneath his feet, and he shifts to the side, leaving space for the others to gradually file in. The cabin gets about half full, and Jimmy turns, facing down towards to the ticket building, studying the empty gift shop through the glass. Novelty t-shirts stare back at him from the racks. 

Then, with the ding of a bell, the tram glides away. It rises above the landscape: the foothills pockmarked with rocks and dark green bushes. The conductor starts talking, but Jimmy just lets the words run past him, his eyes tracing old dirt roads and walking tracks. Looking for footprints in the dust. As the tram climbs, it lifts higher above the earth, and the finer details of the dirt and the plants and the boulders diminish, becoming part of the texture of the whole.

And soon he can see the city falling away beneath him, too. The jagged gridlines of the roads and freeways and buildings that split the land, fracturing it like hot cracked earth, like the granite rock of the mountains, like the grooved and hatchet-marked cliff-faces below the tram. 

Through his airplane window once, Albuquerque had looked like an afterthought, dwarfed by the sky. It had looked like something ready to be forgotten, just another thought to fall out of his head along with so many others—along with the thought of his brother’s eyes as Jimmy had unbuckled his airplane seatbelt; along with the thought of the heavy suitcases that he’d watched slip and shift in the overhead lockers before takeoff; along with the thought of their drive out to O’Hare, Jimmy silent in the passenger seat of the rental car, the radio off and Chuck’s grip tight on the steering wheel. 

And along with the thought of a phone call. 

It had been cold that day in the holding cell, colder than the season, the metal handset pressed tightly to his ear. Jimmy had listened to the line ring for what felt like forever, each silver chime spinning a silver thread across the city, winding toward his mother’s living room. 

And between the chimes came his own breath, fast and heavy, uncontrolled. It echoed through the handset like it was being piped back to him, like the prison phone was just a sick joke, a closed loop, locked inside, and he stood there, his body twisted away from everybody else, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

But then she had answered. 

In a bright and steady voice, or at least his brightest and steadiest, he had said, “Hey, Mom. Something’s happened.”

With a dinging bell, the tram reaches the top of the line. Jimmy steps out, weaving between the tourists, heading to one of the emptier viewing platforms. He’s a little breathless, still, but he’s ten thousand feet up now, and he can feel the thinness of the air. 

He leans against the railed edge, pressing his forearms into the corner of the wood. The mountains drop away sharply beneath him. 

In the dusk, Albuquerque glimmers to light. It seems unfamiliar at first, but then the city starts to take shape, and he thinks he can see the squat skyscrapers of downtown, the geometric cubes that rise from the flat land. He thinks he can see Central Avenue cutting across the city, historic and neon-glowed. And, far away, he thinks can see the airport, its runways stretching along the desert shore. 

He wonders whether, if he looked hard enough, if he stood here long enough, he might also see Hamlin, Hamlin McGill. Might also see Kim’s apartment and the square brightness of her television. Might even see Chuck’s house, still lit by lantern light. 

If he looked hard enough. If he didn’t turn away. If he kept them all in his sights. 

And in the west now, clouds. As the sun vanishes below the horizon, they become briefly clear, shadowed with lilac and orange, and Jimmy can see their shape by the light on them. Can see their dimensions. If he watched for long enough, he thinks that he could also see them moving slowly, driven by high winds. 

The winds move through him, too, hollowing him out. 

He draws his jacket closer. 

As night falls, the distant curve of the horizon vanishes. In the darkness, the flat land below the Sandias seems to go on forever, black and flickering with dying embers: scorched earth. The glow of the city lights is the glow of distant fires burning. He can even smell them on the wind: the woodsmoke scent of evening, of imaginary fire blocks. Stripping everything back so that only the dirt is left.

And he thinks that his whole life since arriving in Albuquerque has been like a controlled burn: searing away the silk shirts and the fake Rolexes and the ice of Michigan Avenue until nothing remains—breath on a cold mirror vanishing—a blank slate. 

Burned back and clean.

So he thinks about what he could build. 

He thinks about his brother on a park bench, surrounded by luminarias. He thinks about a paper-wrapped book with fourteen words inside it. He thinks of other books, too: piles of them on the floor of his apartment, or on a table in a restaurant, or monolithic on shelves at HHM. He thinks of—God, he thinks of Joe Pesci, enormous on the silver screen, running a court room like it’s one big bar trick. 

And he thinks of Kim. He thinks of her asleep at a table in the breakroom, of her lit by neon lights, of her in the driver’s seat beside him. 

He thinks of her tracing letters over his breastbone: _H-H-M. J-i-m-m-y. K-i-m._

He thinks of letting her move against him, move over him, move around him. Of letting her define the edges of him.

And he thinks of Kim in an Alamogordo motel room, laughing and tapping her fingers up his chest, her voice rising like a scale, like familiar elevator chimes: “You could be a lawyer?”

Jimmy wonders if he’s allowed to stay here all night, up on the Sandias. Up on this one high place.

He imagines everyone else leaving, he imagines the city falling dark. He imagines waiting exactly _here_ until the sun returns, until it rises behind him and breaks over the mountains.

Like sitting beside Kim on the trunk of her car, their legs pressed together beneath the blanket. Then, the dawn had seemed to reach out close enough to touch them, huge and breathless, warm fingers on his skin. And Jimmy had inhaled the colors of it: blue and gold and orange, streaks of brightness across the enormous sky. Morning sliding over the land. 

And now he stands on the edge of the viewing platform and he looks out into the darkness of the city. 

And he imagines it all bathed in light. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to everyone who made it this far: thank you so much for reading, for commenting, for all your support. ♥️ 
> 
> and if i could beg just a little more of your time, i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it's just letting me know your favourite scene from this story, or a quick note to say you've made it all the way through! ♥️ ♥️ 
> 
> if you'd like to check out some of the real life places that made their way into this fic, [i've posted some photos here and i'll post more over the next few weeks. ](https://jimmymcgools.tumblr.com/tagged/fic%20inspo)
> 
> also, this is now the first in a series! i'm going to take a little break before starting the sequel, but subscribe to the series if you'd like to be notified ♥️ thank you for reading, and see you again soon!


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